The paper discusses the situation in England and Scotland with regard to the supply of well‐qualified physics teachers. The results of two surveys are described, which support the assertion that there is no shortage of such teachers in Scotland. Some of the suggested reasons for the shortage in England are then discussed in the light of this finding. The main conclusion is that there is no shortage of physics teachers in Scotland because the pool of potential physics teachers is larger as a result of more university students taking physics‐based courses. More students take physics courses because more youngsters study physics beyond sixteen, and more youngsters study physics beyond sixteen because they are taught by well‐qualified physics teachers. The cycle is, therefore, self‐perpetuating.
Recommendations for the IT component of the National Curriculum suggested that Key Stage 2 pupils use “IT to control models such as level crossing barriers and traffic lights”. This paper describes a 3‐year investigation into the use of CONTROL LOGO (and languages with a similar syntax) for control technology in Year 7. It was found that most pupils were able to program simple control sequences using meaningful labels and procedures and that LOGO did assist the acquisition of good programming habits. However, particular difficulties with the LOGO syntax were noted when inputs were being used, and it was concluded that LOGO is unsuitable for this particular purpose.
A common indicator used to determine the ‘performance’ of a school subject department is its Relative Rating, which compares the mean grade that its candidates achieve in the public examination of that subject with the mean grade that they achieve in all the other subjects they are presented for at the same time. Since it is the same candidates, it is assumed that any difference between these mean grades is due to the effectiveness of their subject departments - a positive rating identifying a department that is ‘above average’. Our study shows that this argument is flawed, firstly because candidates perform so inconsistently across their different subjects, that only a small proportion of the ‘rating’ can be attributed to departmental effectiveness and secondly because a department’s Relative Rating is only reliable if its candidates are exactly representative of all candidates nationally, which is unlikely to be true. It is therefore concluded that this indicator is completely useless for its intended purpose.
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