Featured Pilot school

Eleanor Owens, Abbeydale Grange School
Abbeydale Grange is an 11−16, ethnically diverse, comprehensive in Sheffield. All 114 of our Y10 students started the Twenty First Century Science Pilot.

We started the Pilot because I saw that the course had the content and approach that followed my own ideas that science is part of everyday life and everyone should have a basic understanding of the science issues that will meet in their own lives.

When AGS started Twenty First Century Science, everyone, students and teachers, found it very different from the normal way that we had learnt and taught science. The idea that students were to be encouraged to have ideas and opinions of their own on a science issue was difficult to comprehend and so difficult for students to achieve. But as the Pilot has progressed the students have really taken this idea to heart and so become more and more enthusiastic about their science lessons.

I found that as the course progressed, the normal group of students who generally become disillusioned about education were attending science lessons, Attendance in Y11 was better than it had been since I arrived at AGS. To ensure that all students got a final chance to complete the department set up a Coursework Day for Y11’s on the last day of the Easter Holidays.

I did think that we would be lucky if 20 students turned up but I was delighted to have 75 students arrive and spend the day working on a variety of coursework. I was even more surprised when students who had been unable to attend the Coursework Day asked if the department could set up coursework sessions after school.

I have never before had such a positive response to the GCSE Science course. The students have taken on board the new concepts and even found newspaper stories on the way into school and grabbed you as they come in to show you. I’ve been asked if I’ve watched TV programmes and what I thought about the science being discussed. I’ve never discussed so many science issues with GCSE students on the corridor before and this openness to science has been the mainstay of the course. Twenty First Century Science has introduced the idea to students that science is all around and that they are entitled to an opinion about the science in their lives.

Well done Twenty First Century Science. That’s what I came into teaching to do and your course is allowing me to achieve this personal ambition and students achieve a more full and round Science education to prepare them for their future.