Glynne Rowlands, 57, who teaches at Woolgrove school, a special school in Letchworth, has loved science ever since his parents bought him a chemistry set. “You’ve got to make it fun, do lots of practical work, and hands-on learning. I always ask lots of science questions during the course of the week. I’ll say at the dinner table: what sort of plastic is this drinking cup made of? Or ‘Look at the coloured light coming in there’, and then talk about the spectrum.” He pays tribute to the importance of his classroom assistants, and says he has never met a child who doesn’t like science.

Last year Ofsted rated science at the school as “excellent.”

Winning lesson Studying forces by looking at how much tugging was needed to pull pieces of string apart when they had been stuck together with different types of glue. “I tried to use the same type of string, the same length, and the same amount of glue, although one type of string was different and they spotted that that meant it wasn’t a good experiment.”