---
title: "Science education in England"
chunk: 14/14
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_education_in_England"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:21:10.973540+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== University level ===
As for science at university level in England, the specialised (and individualised) nature of study at this tertiary level means that a discussion on developing a national curriculum for university science education has never really taken hold. Instead, the challenges of science education at this level in England (and indeed across the world) have revolved, and still revolve, around the acts of establishing and maintaining one in the first place rather than harmonising content across all university courses. The prevailing politics or government and social norms could be issues for university science education; for example, the priorities of the Early Middle Ages (also known as the Dark Ages) following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire could have been challenges to the development of university science (in England), as could have been the attitudes and beliefs of the same period. In England, although university science education started hundreds of years after pre-university science education, the former eventually prospered in comparison to the latter.
Nevertheless, the threat of closure of a university science department cannot be dismissed: for instance, the Physics Department at Birkbeck, University of London closed in 1997. Another closure was the Chemistry Department at Exeter University in 2005, which the Royal Society of Chemistry criticised. The chemistry department's closure generated intense news coverage, as well as anxiety in other departments and courses in the university, such as geography, and there was also the abuse the university's vice-chancellor received. Commenting on the department's closure, Hodges (2006) alluded to one brutal reality of a university science department's purpose: unlike a school science department, a university science department must not just teach science to its students (as important as that is) but also actively bring in money, via research grants and otherwise (and lots of it). This influences whether a university keeps a science department (which is expensive to run) open or not. Put another way, a school or other pre-university level science department (even one offering science degrees) can survive on a large enough number of students doing its subject and the pass rate of those students, but not a university science department, which also needs to attract a lot of research money. This disparity in the ways a university and a pre-university institution decides whether or not to run a science department might explain why pre-university institutions such as further education colleges offer biology degrees (or foundation degrees) but rarely (if any) chemistry or physics degrees since fewer students study these. Details of universities and further education colleges in England and the rest of the UK offering science degrees can be found on the UCAS website.
But attracting research money to a university science department is a whole quagmire in itself. In addition, several challenges to university science education that link into the issue of university science department survival have been identified by Grove (2015); these  challenges are summarised below:

Operating in a global market
Rising student expectations (as a result of the increased loans students in England have to take to pay their increased tuition fees)
Increasing costs and shifting funding (as the UK government provides less grants and students take on additional loans (on top of the increased tuition fee loans) to compensate)
A demand and need for new technologies
Linking estates, strategy and the student (specific recent examples can be seen in publications from Cambridge and Greenwich universities)
Attracting and retaining the best talent
Making research sustainable
These challenges apply not just to the university provision of science education, but to all areas of university education.

== See also ==
Science Learning Centres

== References ==