The drive is on to increase the number of graduates taking up science teaching. The shortage of physics teachers, followed closely by chemists, paints a bleak picture for the future of science education. The Government and the Teacher Training Agency are pouring money into recruitment, and say they will also be addressing retention.

At the moment the numbers of new recruits and those leaving the profession is on a knife-edge. The DFES merely looks for ‘science’ teachers and does not differentiate between physicists, chemists and biologists.

What no one seems to be doing is looking at the problem from the viewpoint of the curriculum. What if we reformed the curriculum to make us less dependent on subject specialisms? It is time to admit that we have an unsustainable science curriculum and something radical has to be done.

As an admissions tutor for PGCE science, I know that the number of biology graduates applying for science PGCE courses far outstrips those applying for physics or chemistry. Take a look at the statistics for how many physics and chemistry graduates we need to recruit each year to maintain the current curriculum. These reveal that unless we recruit a large proportion of chemists - and nearly every physics graduate - we cannot sustain the teaching of those subjects by specialists.

Our science curriculum has its roots in Victorian society and the need to produce scientists and technologists to maintain our position in world economics as a leading industrial society. If Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the founders of science teaching in schools, were to examine today’s curriculum he would find little new about what we teach and why we teach it.

Admittedly, scientific knowledge and understanding have moved on and this is reflected in our current curriculum. But the fundamental subjects and the approach to teaching is similar. Is it not time, therefore, for a fundamental rethink of what science we teach and why we teach it? Could this provide an answer to the acute lack of science teachers, and create a curriculum that really achieved the objective of delivering a scientifically literate generation of pupils and young adults?

The first question that needs to be asked is why science should occupy such a large proportion of the curriculum, 20 per cent at key stage 4. Is it really necessary to devote a whole day each week to one subject area?

The traditional argument for science taking such a large chunk of time is that we live in a ‘scientific age’. Young people need to be equipped to deal with complex issues involving science and technology, such as global warming, BSE, clones, nuclear power, and other problems as yet unimagined.

The argument has merits. But we must question whether the curriculum actually delivers the scientifically literate population we desire. The science we teach is more a collection of facts and figures than a methodology for dealing with science-based issues.

In fact the history curriculum for key stage 3 provides better skills for attaining scientific literacy. At least history pupils are taught about evaluating sources of evidence and comparing accounts. We have chopped science into biology, chemistry and physics, and shoehorned in geology and astronomy, much to the annoyance of chemists and physicists. We have thus created a dependence on subject specific teaching, leading to the acute shortage we now have. By transforming the structure to look at skills for scientific literacy and utilising the traditional subjects as contextual devices, we would at once release science teachers to be just that, teachers of science not of subjects.

We cannot escape the teaching of some basic knowledge and understanding in science, some facts and underlying, key concepts such as cells, forces and atomic structure. Just like English teaching needs grammar and geography teaching needs map skills, science teaching needs a foundation. But the whole of our curriculum is rooted in teaching science concepts and the facts of science, with very little attention paid to the skills required for scientific literacy that help young people to objectively cope with the demands of science in society. The section of the science curriculum that does mainly address this aspect, Ideas and Evidence, has been comprehensively ignored in previous versions of the curriculum, as it was never examined. So far, its inclusion as an examinable element has failed to make much of an impression in the specifications for the new GCSEs and in many of the textbooks for GCSE.

Science and Technology CurriculumSpecial magazine inside James Williams is a lecturer in science education at Brunel University. He is the author of “Professional Leadership in Schools: Effective Middle Management and Subject Leadership”, published by Kogan Page