For some journalists the economic future of the nation is being undermined by the fall in the number of students taking science-and-technology A levels.
This variant on ‘declining standards’ fastens on trends in A levels like the fall in numbers taking maths, chemistry and physics and concludes that in 20 years time UK technology and science-related industries will be in on their knees for lack of new staff. Like many common-sense views, this reflects a familiar British obsession that, without enough scientists there will be no one to design our battleships, nuclear deterrent or manufactured inventions.
Field day for pressure groups
With the better-informed education correspondents on holiday, science-promotion pressure groups were able to lodge quotations from their press releases in the news pages. So The Guardian had the CBI, the chief executives of QinetiQ and RWE npower as well as the Royal Society of Chemistry calling for bursaries to encourage students to study science and maths. You can see how deep this background assumption runs when John Redwood claims that he is a sensible man of the centre in the Evening Standard because [he] ‘wants to see more young people training as engineers, scientists, technologists and setting up their own businesses’.
Everyone in hospitality, tourism and leisure education is used to seeing this curious hierarchy of subjects in operation. Whatever the relative strength or size of their industries, the ultimate yardstick for a subject is its usefulness to the defence sector: in mind of the public (and the media) science is more economically ‘important’.
This view is sanctified by history, can probably be found in Pepys’ Diary and of course like all the best educational myths is a cross-party view. Well-aired in debates about what was wrong with the Royal Navy’s battle-cruisers at Jutland, it erupted again as one of the planks of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ of technological revolution. The surplus chemistry PhDs produced in that decade have gone on to be leaders of business schools and great publishers – not many of them to work in the rather diminished UK chemical industries – and an earlier generation of surplus chemists included Margaret Thatcher.
The figures – what a surprise
Lo and behold, when the results were published, it emerged that entries for maths A level had increased, and not just by the usual odd percentage point, but by a whopping seven-and-a-half percent. This is a pretty significant shift, because it remains the second most popular A level, with 60,000 entries in 2007. Strangely, there has been a large fall in computing (10%), but even chemistry managed a five-percent increase on last year to return to a total entry very similar to 2000. These facts were not widely reported.
Back in the 1960s, doomsayers were in full cry, around very similar themes. Noël Annan, for instance:
The polys should have concentrated all their efforts on applied science and have been geared to make British industry more productive, more inventive, more competitive. Instead, starved by sixth-form specialisation of applicants wanting to study science and technology, they taught art subjects, and colleges of fine art were often ordered to become part of them. [1]
As a Bloomsbury arts man to the core, he was of course an expert on the needs of British industry and as Provost of Kings College Cambridge preached from a prominent pulpit. After 16, subject choices are freely made by young people. Their choices reflect their own and their parents’ and schools’ assessments of what will benefit them the most, and all commentators would do well to respect that.
References
- Noël Annan Our Age (London 1990) p 501 quoted by Dominic Sandbrook Never Had It So Good (London, Abacus 2005) p 428.
