Featured Pilot school

The Settle Experience - I had a dream
Settle College is a 13-18 Technology College in rural North Yorkshire with about 580 students on role. Last year, when we were just plain Settle High School & Community College, a mixed comprehensive, all 172 of our Y10 students started the pilot. Why?

I had started my teaching career believing all students should leave school understanding enough science to engage with the scientific issues that they would have to confront in their lives. The belief had never really gone away but the reality had become an increasingly unsatisfactory cramming of scientific "facts" into students who couldn't see why they needed to know them and often my frustrated "because it will be in the exam" explanation rang extremely hollow even to me.

One of my first jobs after becoming head of department in 2002 was to find an Applied GCSE course to replace our unsatisfactory Rural Science / Single science option. By chance, during my research, I happened across details of Twenty First Century Science Pilot, a science course with, as its core, the aim of "scientific literacy" for all, and it could prepare students for Advanced studies and there was an applied option. I was so seduced by the idea I persuaded the department to leap in at the deep end.

Looking back, over the first two years of the pilot it seems naively brave and I'm still not sure I could explain how we timetabled all the units and shared our limited ICT resources. I certainly wouldn't have missed the experience and none of the six other science staff resigned so it can't all have been too bad. Indeed, now all the units have been written we anticipate next year being very straight forward, with all students taking the Core GCSE in Y10 and then either the Applied or General in Y11 rather than the complicated mixture of units we have dealt with over the last two years.

So did the reality of Twenty First Century Science meet our expectations and what did the students think? Well the resources proved a big hit with staff and students and are being refined and differentiated for 2006. As promised, the courses, particularly the Core, really do address science issues of relevance and importance to citizens rather than simply being the first step in a scientific training that the vast majority wouldn't continue. The students still complain of too much homework, that some of science is too difficult. But, and it is a huge but, not one student in the last 18 months has asked me "why do I have to know this?".

At last the dream is reality. We will certainly be continuing with Twenty First Century Science post pilot. Long term we hope that there will be an improvement in GCSE grades and in the numbers of students studying sciences at Advanced level. The modular exam results so far are very encouraging as is the doubling of the number of students expressing an interest in taking AS level Biology.