Good Practical Science

10% sample of English secondary schools surveyed (Pye Tait Consulting); 6 country visits; PwC costing exercise

English secondary school science, ages 11-18, benchmarked against the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Australia and the USA.

Grey literature, not research: an expert-led benchmarking report commissioned by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and written by Sir John Holman. Three evidence strands: (1) international country visits; (2) a Pye Tait survey of a 10% sample of English schools against 10 proposed benchmarks; (3) an activity-based costing exercise by PricewaterhouseCoopers using the Standard Cost Model. NO causal evidence of any kind — the report's premise is that practical science is valuable and its question is how to do it well and what it costs. Recorded here for the COST data and for the frequency baseline, not as evidence of effectiveness.

THE COST FILE, and it substantially qualifies the 'enormous cost' half of the thesis. PwC's activity-based costing found that by far the greatest part of the cost of practical science is STAFF TIME, the large majority of it teachers' time; the capital costs of laboratories and equipment are small by comparison. And the report makes the marginal-cost point explicitly: the school is already paying teacher salaries, and if the teachers were not doing practical science they would be doing some other learning activity. So the true economic cost of practical work is not the microscopes and the technicians — it is the OPPORTUNITY COST of the lesson time, which is the correct denominator for any effectiveness estimate and which almost no study in this literature uses (nearly every comparison is against no teaching rather than against the next-best use of the same hour). Other figures worth keeping: the report's frequency benchmark is a practical activity in at least half of all science lessons, which only 40% of English schools currently meet; UK technician provision is among the best in the world and three of the six comparison countries (USA, Germany, Finland) employ no school laboratory technicians at all — which is itself a natural experiment nobody has exploited.

Not applicable — descriptive and costing data, no outcome claim.

Complements the SCORE resourcing surveys (consumables and equipment spend) which measure a different and much smaller slice of the same cost base.