CURRICULUM// PHYSICS
GIRLS DOING PHYSICS
Pocklington Leads the Way
Recently, the BBC ran a story about the number of girls
choosing to take Physics at A Level – and the headlines make
pretty depressing reading. Here they are:
• Nationally, only 1.9% of girls choose the A Level
• In Independent Co-Education Schools (like
Pocklington) that figure climbs to 4.8%
• Even in Independent Girls’ Schools, it is a
dismal 7.5%
So, how does Pocklington fare? How does our Physics
department stack up against those in the rest of the country?
Well, it would be fair to say that things appear to be pretty
healthy – as the stats over the last ten years show.
• On average, a whopping 16.3% of our L6 girls
have chosen to study Physics
• Even in what was by far the ‘worst’ year from the last
decade, 8.1% still opted for the subject
• The numbers overall are stable, showing neither a
rise nor a fall over the period as a whole
One question immediately surfaces – Why?
measures like appointing a ‘Senior Gender Champion’ and
providing ‘Gender awareness and Unconscious Bias’ training
for all staff.
The odd thing is, though, that none of these points applies
to Pocklington! What, then, could it be that is leading to our
astonishing level of success? Is an inspirational female Physics
teacher the perfect role model? No – the full-time teaching
staff have all been men. Is the subject matter being changed
somehow to make it more girl-friendly? No – we wouldn’t even
really know what that means! So what is going on? Perhaps
the answer lies in a rather simpler, but far more important
consideration…
Physicists are People Too!
The three full-time teachers over this ten-year span have been
Mr Binks, Mr Ward, and Mr Hutchings. Is there anything
that these men have in common that might be the key to
understanding what is going on at Pocklington? Well, how
about this for a possible answer: between them, they have
held senior positions of Pastoral Care within the Pocklington
School family for no less than fifty years!
All three, it turns out, have had long and successful spells as
Housemasters – covering both Boarding and Day School,
Middle School and Sixth Form. It is cliché, for sure – but they
do not so much teach Physics as teach people.
For Mr Binks, this could manifest in terrible jokes, drawn out
anecdotes from the ‘old days’, or spontaneous (and highly
illegal) cake breaks. For Mr Ward, it could be a tangential
discussion about Star Trek (or, at a stretch, Lord of the Rings),
a reassuring phone call to a worried parent, or a fiendishly hard
treasure hunt where the clues would have Einstein scratching
his head.
For Mr Hutchings, it is “story time” – sometimes whole
lessons with heads resting on desks, listening to who exactly
discovered this Law of Nature, when and how, what they
called it, why it nearly didn’t work, and how our world might
be totally different if just one small detail had been altered. (Mr
Hutchings has even written a book packed with science stories,
which you can buy on Amazon.
What is the Secret?
According to the Institute of Physics, who published the
BBC story data, schools which are doing well in recruiting
girls have several things in common. They’ve introduced
Is this, perhaps, why so many more girls are choosing Physics
at Pocklington than almost anywhere else? It might not please
the statisticians to hear an answer that can’t be put into a
spreadsheet – but maybe, just maybe, it is true: our girls might
be choosing Physics because in our labs they aren’t just a
number studying numbers. At Pocklington our Physicists are
people; and they are learning about the world.
THE POCKLINGTONIAN
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