We are very pleased to award The Sele School a grant for their A level and GCSE students to attend the (online) Science in Action events.
Trips and one-off events are hard to pass through our award criteria as there is always the question of depth of benefit to learning and motivation and longevity of any such benefit after the “Wow” event is over. The best way (in our opinion) to address these concerns is to show how previous events have affected students’ attainment and interest in the subject. Another, is to demonstrate pupils’ enthusiasm for the event as Laura Morgan (Head of Science) did in her application:
“Having run a successful trip to see Lord Robert Winston last year (Oct 2019) with our Year 9, we saw a dramatic rise in the number of these students opting for Triple Science. When these students were interviewed on their reasoning, they expressed their desire to continue their Science education beyond school and work in the Scientific field (largely medicine due to the nature of the talk, but some also in research). This paired with the student voice forms from the trip showed that this experience, which allowed students to listen to and question to successful people in the industry, highlighted how important Science is when considering their career, and has inspired to our current Year 10 cohort.
In 2015 and 2016 GCSE and A level students attended the Science Live event (which again had several inspirational speakers). One of the most noticeable was Dr Maggie Aderin Pocock, who is a Space Scientist. One of our Year 11 students was so inspired by her speech he switched his A-Level choices from Drama and English to Physics Chemistry and Maths and is now at Keele University studying Astrophysics and Maths. Of the same cohort came a young lady who was focused on Mathematics and switched her University application to Forensic Science having heard these passionate Scientists speak.
The Science in Action events provide the opportunity for our students to still benefit from hearing inspirational speakers, despite the current pandemic that has left their faith in education shaken. “
Laura also explained some specific learning benefits of the trip:
“A unique benefit to these sessions is that GCSE and A-Level students will also be guided through an exam preparation session which, due to lockdown many of our students feel incredibly anxious about. I feel this is invaluable to our student's success. Another benefit to this is that each GCSE student will receive a revision guide. As a department we feel it is important to provide these resources for our students many of whom are from disadvantaged homes. All year 11's had a revision guide for the academic year 2019-2020 funded by the Faculty. As these student's time at school was cut short, and due to dwindling faculty budget, it has not been possible to regain these resources and such our current Year 11 cohort are currently without.”