Talking Science: Tackling the stubborn challenges of the disadvantage gap

This year’s Talking Science explores the deep-seated roots of disadvantage and their impact on young people’s educational opportunities, and highlights successful as well as less successful interventions both in the UK and further afield in narrowing the gap. Following short stimulus inputs from our speakers, this session will be chaired by Professor Dame Athene Donald, and along with Professor Lee Elliot-Major and ASE President Professor Louise Archer, delegates will discuss and prioritise their recommendations for equity centred policy reform. SEPA will provide a write-up summary of ideas discussed and recommendations following this event. In common with our previous Talking Science sessions, this session promises thought-provoking insights and lively debate. We look forward to seeing you there and your contributions. Lee Elliot Major: Embracing equity in education: The equity approach strives to make schools genuinely inclusive, encouraging us to look at children not through a lens of deficit—what they lack—but through a lens of capacity—what strengths they bring. It focuses on removing obstacles to learning and acknowledging the biases and barriers we create in schools. This includes replacing unhelpful labels such as ‘disadvantaged pupils’, removing cultural and material barriers, and nurturing mutually respectful relationships with parents. Equity best bets, based on syntheses of research and expert practitioner knowledge, offer teachers practical strategies to create a language, pedagogy, curriculum and partnership of equity. Louise Archer: Time to eat the frog: a vision for equitable science education: "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day" (Mark Twain) . Science education has the potential to help challenge social disadvantage through enabling social mobility, active citizenship and responsible innovation. Yet, despite decades of interventions, research and reforms, this equitable potential remains significantly under realised, and the sector continues to reproduce (rather than disrupt/challenge) existing social hierarchies. Drawing from international research and scholarship on intersectional injustices in science education, I argue that for meaningful change, we need to urgently identify and tackle the core issues that create and sustain social disadvantage – even if these are difficult and unpalatable. That is, we need to ‘eat the frog’ (to borrow liberally from Twain). I first describe the frog – namely the dominant ways that science education policy/ practice misunderstands social disadvantage by misrecognising the structural nature of the problem and how everyday science education practices sustain inequality and resist change. I then outline five (‘big’ and ‘little’) ways in which we could ‘eat the frog’ by making science education policy and practice more equitable. The Science Education Policy Alliance (SEPA) brings together the Association for Science Education, Institute of Physics, Royal Society, Royal Society of Biology and Royal Society of Chemistry to coordinate and collaborate on science education policy, with Professor Dame Athene Donald DBE FRS as Chair. www.se-pa.co.uk Refreshments will be served half-way through this session, courtesy of SEPA.