Nuffield Science Teaching Project

The Nuffield Science Teaching Project was a programme to develop a better approach to teaching science in Britishsecondary schools, under the auspices of the Nuffield Foundation. Although not intended as a curriculum, it gave rise to alternative national examinations, and its use of discovery learning was influential in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1957, the Science Masters Association (later amalgamated with the Association of Women Science Teachers as The Association for Science Education) established a Science Teaching Subcommittee, later the Science and Education Subcommittee, led by its chairman, Henry Boulind, a physicist who had attended a UNESCO conference the previous year in Hamburg and come away persuaded that science teaching, particularly in physics, needed to be brought up to date for the post-war atomic age and to become teaching "in and through science". Subject panels in physics, chemistry, biology and general science developed new syllabi for 'O' and 'A' levels which were presented to the Secondary Schools Examination Council in 1960. The Staff Inspector for Science, R. A. R. Tricker, criticised the physics syllabus as overly theoretical and a year's practical trial of the material was conducted in 30 schools. The subcommittee then invited representatives from government and the Institutes of Physics and Chemistry to a meeting in August 1961 at Barrow Court, where the consensus was that outside funding should be sought for a full process to develop curricula and teaching materials. The Nuffield Foundation had also been investigating the problem, and sponsored a meeting at Battersea College of Technology hosted by the Head of Physics, Lewis Elton, in April 1961, and also consulted John Lewis, the senior science master at Malvern College, who had been involved at all stages in the Association's Subcommittee and had been impressed by the science teaching he had seen in a tour of Russia. The hope was to improve British science teaching, and hence British industry, "by persuasion" where Russia had done so "by compulsion". In December the Nuffield Foundation agreed to fund the effort to improve science education in England and Wales, building on the Science Masters Association's work, but on its own terms, with an initial commitment of £250,000 for three working groups to develop outlines, textbooks, teachers' guides and classroom equipment for the teaching of physics, chemistry and biology to pupils aged 11–15, and the Minister of Education, Sir David Eccles, announced the plan in the House of Commons on 4 April 1962.

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