And the Partially Blind Shall Lead Them. (April 20, 2005)

    The matter of the secondary school teaching of the enabling sciences has come 'round once again. While the Minister for Education Science and Training is preening over his Australian Government's Innovation Report 2004-05 the Australian Council of Deans of Science have issued a report which concludes that high school science students are being instructed by teachers with only a basic grasp of physics and chemistry.

The deans' study, Who's Teaching Science? declares, "There are people teaching secondary school science who have low levels of academic preparation, if any, and the situation may worsen," and Australian schools will face a chronic shortage of science teachers within 10 years, as the bulk of baby boomers retires.

The president of the Australian Council of Deans of Science, Tim Brown, and dean of science at ANU, told The Australian "In the enabling sciences we do have a high proportion of teachers who are manifestly unprepared to be able to teach at a world's best practice level at Year 12,"

John Rice, the dean of science at the University of Technology, Sydney, told The Sydney Morning Herald that declining science teaching standards had been obvious for a decade, with little action from federal or state governments. "a huge injection of resources" was needed to get qualified graduates into science teaching. One-third of the male teachers surveyed were over 50 and headed for retirement.

Professor Brown observed, "We believe strongly that, for teachers to engage their students in exciting work, they need to have a very high level of competence in the discipline."

Kerri-Lee Harris who was a co-author of Who's Teaching Science told The Australian the inadequacy of discipline-specific training was in stark contrast to the 90 per cent of science department heads in Australian schools who believed the minimum qualification needed to teach senior science classes was a major in the relevant area. In addition The Australian Louise Perry reports that according to Dr Harris, "younger science teachers would not commit to remaining in the profession. 'They are not at all sure that they are going to stay [in teaching]. When you ask them what they are going to be doing in five years, 10 per cent say, "Not teaching" and another 40 per cent say "I really don't know". We need to be attracting more well-qualified people. We need to be supporting those teachers once we get them into schools ... and we need to be keeping them there.'"

 Professor Brown has little doubt that the problem will worsen unless there is useful governmental intervention such as "providing a specific HECS incentive or scholarship for students who study science and then go on to teaching done by way of relief from taxation obligations". Furthermore unless salaries competitive with industry were offered nothing substantial will be effected.

So far there is little indication that either the federal or state governments are listening.