I have spent most of my teaching career spent swimming against the tide. I have a lifelong belief in diversity and the creation of opportunities for everyone in science. This should not be controversial, but it is.

My concern is both personal and professional. As the older sister of someone with severe learning difficulties, I discovered early on that people don’t always see the capabilities of those who are visibly different, instead focusing negatively on the way in which they “deviate” from the norm.

Similarly, my personal awareness of the individual behind the clinical label has led me to be wary of the education system’s focus on the clinical labelling of difference. My sister’s label of autism is not nearly sufficient to capture her difficulties and strengths.

As a new teacher in England in the 1980s, I saw the impact of the national curriculum on pupils with additional support needs (ASN), to use the term now applied in Scotland. Instead of doing a range of applied-science options, they were now all put on a common pathway in science.

They were expected to engage with very abstract notions that research evidence tells us many pupils can’t grasp at the point when these are introduced. The need to ensure pupils get good GCSE grades has resulted in teachers feeling pressured to remove the elements of science that are engaging or, dare I say it, fun.

So, less learning about gears through time-trialling bikes over the playground and more pencil-and-paper lessons to “deliver” assessable content. And those children who had enjoyed tending school allotments during science were sitting in classrooms learning material that didn’t feel purposeful to them.

In retrospect, I feel many pupils were failed by the system, not because they were failures themselves but because of teachers’ fear about deviating from the prescribed curriculum.

Open to feedback

In the course of 16 years in the classroom, I found my pupils taught me a great deal about my teaching and their learning. I also learned the value of remaining reflective about lessons and open to student feedback, whether verbal or behavioural.

For example, some of the older hoodlums who were regularly turned out of their science lessons transpired not to have grasped some very basic concepts, such as “particles”. So how they were supposed to make sense of atomic bonding, which was being taught in their lessons, was beyond me.

I also learned how well these learners would work on a subject that inspired them. One group of pupils with ASN became fascinated by the story of Galileo during a module on astronomy. “How come he was punished when he was right?” one asked indignantly.

Week after week, they wanted yet another lesson about him, bringing me books they had found and asking me to read them. Almost incidentally, these students began to achieve better-than-expected assessment scores. It is really encouraging to see similar techniques being advocated once again, through the “science capital” approach (Godec, King and Archer, 2017). But I have to wonder what has happened in the meantime to the many disengaged students who have been lost to Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths).

Positive experiences

One of the historical tensions is that curriculum science has been seen as “difficult” and those who teach it have tended to focus on the most able students. This has meant that the students who struggled the most were assigned to science staff who were less effective. Alternatively, the lower-attaining students were assigned non-specialist staff (because “it won’t make any difference anyway” ).

By contrast, what I have sought to do for my colleagues and students at the University of Strathclyde is to give them a positive experience of working with learners with ASN, during which they see that their secure grasp of complex ideas is important, but not in simply reproducing them for learners.

Instead, a deep understanding helps them to mediate effectively between the formal discipline and the more experiential learning that many students with learning difficulties enjoy and succeed at. The value of working with diverse learners successfully in an act of co-creation gives these able scientists confidence that they can be effective in teaching them.

I recognise this effect from personal experience, as a colleague did the same for me at the start of my teaching career. Margaret Minns has been such an enduring influence on me that I donate a prize at my inclusive Salters’ Institute Festivals of Chemistry each year in her memory.

University staff and undergraduates discover that they can do science successfully and enjoyably with a type of learner with whom they had previously had no contact.

One volunteer explained that one of the reasons they love doing the inclusive science events - which are designed to be accessible to students with a wide range of support needs - is that they get to not only teach science to a captivated audience but also learn from them and their insights.

The volunteer said: “For example, during the treasure hunt for a recent ASN children’s event, I asked the group I was mentoring to answer a simple question on the treasure hunt list: something strong a human being makes. The response I got was ‘knowledge’. I was blown away.

“I would have never thought to give that response, even though I agree with it wholeheartedly. We tend to underestimate these children … and, unfortunately, they learn to underestimate themselves.”

This type of response typifies the success of the inclusive science events and is reflected in their recent growth in number, from one a year in the UK in 2017 to five in the forthcoming academic year.

Becoming a university-based chemistry teacher educator, with a focus on outreach, has enabled me to work with a large number of schools and teachers at such inclusive science events. Supported by the Salters’ Institute, which sponsors the chemistry festivals, and in consultation with staff and participating students, I made adjustments to the events to make them accessible.

I had originally wanted to have days that were attended by all students, but that was resisted for reasons that I later came to understand when I researched staff views (Essex, 2018). Some of the reasoning was logistical. For instance, the staffing demand of escorting the pupils meant that it was easier to attend if larger groups could come from one school.

These modifications would all come to be covered slightly later by the Equality Act 2010’s expectation of “reasonable adjustments”. Other factors, specifically staff’s fear of their pupils being humiliated or ridiculed, did not emerge until later.

The most common description of what they wanted from science events was that people would be kind to their students, reminiscent of the way that 19th-century society removed those who were different to an asylum, where they could be protected. This observation confirms the notion that still “science education occupies a place at the curriculum high table” (Dillon, 2018).

Despite this, staff working with pupils with ASN are very positive about the benefits of science, not so much in anticipation of a good career but simply because students enjoy it. They also value the synoptic nature of the subject, which provides additional opportunities to rehearse literacy and numeracy. My more recent study, yet to be published, corroborates these opinions; it saddens me that policy and the science curriculum continue to lag behind.

The evidence void

Finding out about best teaching and learning for students with ASN beyond using empirical observations of what is generally beneficial has been slow work. Research funding for it is even more difficult than for other subjects because funders don’t see the point of science for these learners.

I would love to show them some of the extraordinary responses of pupils to science, both in school and at outreach events, which mirror the (far too rare) findings of others (Brooke and Solomon, 2001). Apart from the worrying assumption that these children don’t deserve the same, any prospect of research funding is also undermined by a lack of the sort of evidence-informed best practice by their teachers that we expect for other children. Add to that the notion that science is not of benefit or relevance to this population, and an evidence void is created (Essex, 2019).

Unless we resist these premises, until we have evidence to support them, we will be teaching science only to those whom we expect to become professional scientists. If, conversely, we think that science is a cultural entitlement for all, we have to ask: why are some learners not counted as part of that “all”?

At a practical level, data I have gathered this year suggests a positive benefit to learning science for all learners, including the most severely learning disabled. I very much hope that this will encourage research funders and policymakers to think again.

In July, I received the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Inclusion and Diversity Prize. It was a really proud moment. Sadly, though, I received the award for initiating a discussion about whether science should be a universal entitlement rather than for bringing in the changes needed to make it so.

But I intend to keep pushing for those changes, the greatest of which is altering people’s understanding of what science is - and who it is for.

Jane Essex is a University of Strathclyde lecturer in chemistry education. She previously worked in initial teacher education at Keele University and taught science in schools in England. In July, she was presented with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Inclusion and Diversity Prize

This article originally appeared in the 6 September 2019 issue under the headline “Science for all should be fact, not fiction”