UK Secondary School Students Eschew Physics as too Difficult But... (August 13, 2006)

    Science 1982 analysis by researchers from the University of Buckingham shows that the number of A-level exam entries in physics has halved since 1982.

The report's authors, Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson of the University of Buckingham's centre for education, warned the situation could get worse as fewer physics graduates were training to teach the subject in UK schools.

According to Professor Smithers, "Physics is in the grip of a long-term downward spiral. Not enough young people ... take physics degrees, which means the pool from which to recruit teachers is not large enough. Many young people do not get sufficient opportunity to discover if they are good at physics and they are naturally disinclined to take what they believe is a difficult subject at A-level."

Interestingly, however, the report found that while the number of A-level entries had fallen to 28,119 last year from 55,728 in 1982, pupils have been scoring better grades. The number of A-grades awarded increased by 27.2% from 6,323 in 1990 to 8,042 in 2005 suggesting that it was the better students that still were interested studying A-level physics, i.e. those numbers better reflected the increase in student numbers per se and the ones opting not to attempt A-levels in physics were the ones more likely to fail their physics A-levels.