Leading Article: Urgent need for the appliance of science

PUPILS who will today receive their A-level results deserve collective congratulations. They have succeeded in gaining more passes and high grades, confirming a steady improvement in performance over the past 10 years. But that welcome news is yet again tempered by the contrasting confirmation of a remorseless erosion of the proportion who choose to study science. Our culture still shows those long-standing symptoms of national decline: a downgrading of scientific skills and numeracy, accompanied by a glamorising of the arts.

Some see no great cause for alarm. Increasing numbers are taking vocational and technological courses in further education; and young people have the right to choose their own courses. If that is what they want, so be it. But those are excuses, born from unease about the prospects of finding a solution.

A-level students are, roughly, the brightest third of the population: if they are mostly opting for non-science courses at the early age of 16 or 17, there can be no hope of raising the status of science, technology and engineering later on. Of course, the arts do create wealth; but we cannot sustain a competitive economy as a kind of creative design contractor for foreign manufacturers.

England's degrading legacy of snobbery towards scientists and engineers has created a terrible bind, from which it is proving very difficult to break free. Too many employers value prestigious educational backgrounds above technical or scientific training, so Oxbridge arts graduates still find it easier to achieve positions of social and commercial power. Young people are quite discerning: most of the cultural messages they receive say that higher earnings and rewarding working lives are not to be found in the world of science and engineering, and they behave accordingly. They also see arts subjects as easier options, because command of science and maths grows ever more difficult as our knowledge advances.

Deeply ingrained attitudes are notoriously hard to shift, so there is little hope of change by exhortation. The Government is adopting some approaches that may help - creating vocational A-levels, offering incentive bursaries to engineering candidates with high A-level grades, and providing funds to support four-year degree courses in maths and physics, for example. However, ministers' other tactic - limiting arts and social science places by reducing course funds - offers nothing much more than a build-up of frustration.

The best prospect for a long-term change in attitude is A-level reform, supported by a fresh approach to schooling that views education from 14 to 19 as a continuous phase. Instead of most pupils specialising in either three arts or three science subjects at A-level, we should develop an award equivalent to A-level that requires them to continue with a mix of, say, five subjects, with a scientific and a mathematical subject being obligatory.

The Government is reluctant to tamper with the 'gold standard' of academic A-levels, but it cannot have it both ways: either A-levels are reformed, or the Prime Minister's ambition of raising scientific and technical esteem remains a fantasy. It would be wrong to force a whole generation into higher education courses that they would not choose; but there is nothing wrong with encouraging them to keep their minds open, along with their options, for a couple more years.