• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Education Matters: Space Expert Warns Scientists Are Becoming a Vanishing Breed

Posted on: Monday, 4 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

Britain will run out of worldleading scientists unless the spiral in science education is stopped, a top space expert said. Professor Colin Pillinger, who led the ill-fated Beagle2 mission to Mars, expressed his fears at the implications of falling interest in sciences at school.

He said education had to be put right now if the world's most exciting future projects were to involve British experts.

This year's figures showed the number of students taking Alevel sciences fell by 6.5 per cent, and science test results for 11 and 14 year olds were also down.

'I'm very concerned. All the indicators are going in the wrong direction,' Prof Pillinger said. 'It's a spiral.'

He warned that the supply of top quality scientists working on ambitious projects like the Mars mission could dry up if the decline in science education continued.

'We are a vanishing breed if we don't have people coming through the system,' he said.

'We need two things. We need both quality and quantity. If we don't have the quantity the chances of getting the quality are very much diminished.

'You really need a lot of people doing science in order to get a proportion of Nobel Prize winners in the future.'

But Prof Pillinger said he received a lot of letters from schools asking him to come and talk to children about the Mars mission.

'If you want kids to study science their parents have got to be interested as well,' he said. 'Beagle demonstrated that everybody is interested right across the spectrum.'

He said people from all walks of life must be turned on to the subject. Prof Pillinger urged Ministers to do more to make sure Britain leads the way in space exploration in the future, with better education and more funding. A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said science was a central priority for teaching 11-14 year-olds.

'We will be retaining this focus in order to improve performance next year after the unexpected fall in this year's results,' he said.

More News in this Category