The major shortage in the supply of STEM skills in the UK damages our economic prospects – costing to the tune of £1.5 billion a year according to some estimates. The end of secondary school is a pivotal juncture in the pipeline for building skills towards careers in STEM as science and maths cease to be compulsory.
To mark national STEM day, the Education Policy Institute and CfEY have published a new report focused on how we might begin to address this shortage.
In particular, it looks in depth at some of the groups that are under-represented in making the transition onto post-16 STEM courses, including girls, those eligible for free school meals and from certain ethnic backgrounds.
It shows that the progress of disadvantaged and Black Caribbean pupils is particularly hindered by their low attainment at age 16.
Pupils eligible for free school meals in the past six years (FSM6) are around half as likely as their peers to progress into post-16 STEM courses, but their chances are only 4 per cent lower when we compare them to pupils with similar key stage 4 attainment.
These new findings add to the list of reasons, if more were needed, for the government to develop a renewed strategy for closing the disadvantage gap – a gap that means that by the end of secondary school, disadvantaged pupils are the equivalent of 19 months of learning behind their peers,
While for some groups prior attainment explains why they are less likely to progress to STEM, for others it is masking the true extent of the problem.
Girls are around 40 per cent less likely than boys to progress to level 3 STEM despite having higher attainment than them at GCSE. Once we controlled for prior attainment, the gap widened further. In fact, we found that girls are actually 60 per cent less likely to progress when comparing girls to boys with similar attainment at key stage 4.
Gender differences appear to be driven by preferences for studying STEM courses.
The value of these skills and of workforce diversity are of the upmost importance
Young people told us that their choices about what to study in the future were influenced by their secondary school teachers. Recruiting specialist maths and science teachers in secondary schools may therefore be the route to addressing the gender gap and increasing progression to STEM subjects overall.
But this is easier said than done. Successive governments have struggled to recruit enough specialist teachers. Last year, the government only met 63 per cent of its recruitment target for maths teachers, and just 17 per cent of its target in physics. Differentiated pay is one way to boost recruitment and improve retention.
We also found that the specific secondary school a pupil attended actually played a relatively modest role in determining pupils’ likelihood of progressing. After adjusting for observable pupil characteristics, the school attended accounts for around 7 per cent of differences in rates of progression.
Schools tend to have broadly the same approach to interventions across all pupils, despite the specific barriers to, and enablers of, post-16 STEM participation varying.
In most cases we show that the differential effect of schools on different pupil groups is relatively small, when compared to the overall effect schools have on all their pupils.
It is therefore important for school leaders to further consider how they can implement programmes that are more tightly focused on increasing the representation of currently under-represented pupil groups.
None of our proposed recommendations are likely ‘quick wins’, but over time they will enable the school system to better support a higher quality and more representative pipeline of pupils taking higher level STEM qualifications.
For a government that wants to see economic growth, the value of these skills and of diversity to the economy in the long run are of the upmost importance.
Read the full report here
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