UK Universities Struggle to Teach "Spoonfed" School Leavers Basic Maths and Science Skills. (June 12, 2008)

While the Bradley committee is spending the rest of this year to deliver a report on what it sees should be done for and with Australia's higher

David Robb

 education sector it might cast an eye on the quality of the input it is receiving from the nation's secondary schools.

So, for example, are the observations made by Imperial Collage's David Robb, a senior lecturer at Imperial, addressing the British House of Commons schools select committee pertinent to Australia, and if so what role should the universities play in correcting the situation.

Mr Robb to the select committee:

We need students coming into our university who are really confident with their basic mathematical and physical principles.

Engineers have got to get things right. You can't say, 'this looks about right'. You have got to believe in those calculations. There are people's lives at stake. If you get the calculations wrong, engineers can kill.

We have actually had to extend most of our courses from three years to four years.

Some of the first year is actually bringing them up to the level they should have been and hopefully also making them aware of their ability to survive outside of a school environment where they are spoonfed.

When I started 20 years ago I would look at grade Bs as a standard entry requirement.

Last year we asked for straight As and it was totally oversubscribed. The A-level assessment at the moment is not providing the filter that we require.

When is the A** going to come in? If you look at the trend in A-grades it's going up every year.

A-levels were originally designed as an entrance to university and it has now been distorted to a general education qualification.

Part of the first term is spent bringing people up to where they would have been 10 years ago. Now less than 40% of students come with pure and applied maths.

And Mr Robb told The Guardian that there are not enough qualified science teachers in schools to spark pupils' interest, while Nick Dusic, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said: "We hear from universities that it's a problem and having to put more effort in at the beginning to get students up to scratch," and he added that unqualified teachers were partly to blame. "It's an issue of improving the curriculum and improving the supply of trained science and maths teachers. That goes hand in hand with improving the quality of education."