 Dyna maen nhw yw ardurog, neu rai unwar i hefyd. Mae'r dyn pleased a dynu hefyd ar hyn. A él ac yn ddifrif, mae hefyd yn gennym ni. Mae'r ddusio os honi chi wedi'i ei ddysgu a dynnu eu ddysgu. On i'n ddysgu i'r d comfortablyawd a yn ystod i'r Ddiwrnod a dylw i'r ddefnyddio i'r ddalfnwch yn ymwyaf atio'r ddusio. A'r rai'n ddysgu i ddysgu iawn. I echo Caroline's congratulations. It's quite a tough year, but well done. You got through and here you are ready to go. What we're going to talk about today or what I'm going to talk about is who we are at the Institute, some things about what we think, then what we do, how we can support you, why we do it and then what happens next. The Institute itself is a membership charity. We have an education arm, but basically we are a membership professional body for 50,000 professional physicists. We provide professional recognition for physicists, but also for teachers, and we're very keen that teachers become part of that community of physics, as I will say later. Within the Institute we have a council who decides what we do, and over the years, as there have been increasing difficulties with physics education, a shortage of physics teachers and so on, they have put more and more money into projects we do, and then we've had government funding. We're now quite a sizeable group team at the Institute. There we are standing outside our old building actually, last summer. There are about 20 of us in the office in London, and then we have a network of people around the country. In the office is part of the team, but also Joe and Joe who weren't available for the photograph last year, and you'll see them. One Joe is at the back, and the other Joe is at the back. In Lawrence, who works remotely, who thinks about curriculum and supporting physics teachers through the web, has produced our SPT resources. Gary, who looks after our physics network coordinators, of which there are 50, and they look a bit like Ruth, who is there. We have 50 people looking a bit like Ruth, we have another one here that looks very similar actually. Jerry in the middle, any other physics network, Alessio's here, I saw, and Sue. We've got 50 people around the country who you can contact and who can support you directly in your schools. We also have a network of 35 teaching and learning coaches who do more intensive work in schools. You may find yourself in a school that's supported by a teaching and learning coach, but they're not so freely available as the physics network coordinators. About five years ago, we got together as a group and wanted to come up with an inspirational phrase for ourselves really, but also for the wider community. So what is it that we think we're doing? We came up with this phrase, which I won't read to you, but I'll take out bits of it, cultural entitlement. So it sounds a bit high for Luton, but we believe it. So in the same way that children should be exposed to some history, some of their history, they should know about geography. They should probably read some poetry, maybe have access to learning a musical instrument, at least do music in a group. These are bits of their culture. They should know about, have exposure to and have an opportunity to participate in those activities. In the same way, physics is a cultural entitlement. There are aspects of physics and the way of thinking like a physicist that are unique, and if children don't get access to those, then they are being denied something that could or would very likely enrich their lives. That doesn't mean to say that they have to follow physics beyond at the moment the age of 16, but they should get exposure to an authentic version of physics, thinking like a physicist, before that point so that they can make an informed choice. So it is more than just a subject in the curriculum. It is their entitlement to see what it's like to think like a physicist, an intellectual and cultural entitlement. The single biggest factor that will enable them to do that and will determine their progress in physics, their enjoyment of it, their engagement with it, is the teacher in front of them. All the evidence continually points to the teacher in front of a group of children being the biggest influence on their engagement with that subject. You can muck about with the curriculum, you can build new schools, you can change the exam system, but if you don't put the right people in front of kids, they won't be engaged, they won't learn well. And that, of course, is something I hope you all believe. In fact, even from your experience, I'm sure you know that it is the case. But the reason that you're going into teaching is you believe you can make a difference by standing in front of those children and talking to them about, in this case, physics. So we need a complete workforce, it needs to be engaged itself, it needs to be professional, and the teachers within it need to be accomplished. And they need to continually develop. So part of the reason for today, I think, is to begin a relationship with you. We are deeply committed to a community of people teaching physics. We are then against the idea of isolated people re-learning constantly what it is to be a physics teacher. So please do see today as the first step in that relationship with us. Or it might be the second. You may have built a relationship with the Institute already through your training. I mentioned our membership before, and this is something, of course, that we can say as a membership organisation is that teaching physics is doing physics. So in the same way as the team at CERN identified the Higgs particle, or a particle that shows Higgs-like properties, we can say to you you are doing physics just as much as that team. So partly it's doing the job of physics, it's keeping physics as a discipline alive in schools, but also you will find increasingly that you are pushing forward the frontiers of understanding of physics. And this is something that I think when I was teaching came as a bit of a surprise to me, that you can think about the subject at a very deep level because you go back to some things that you haven't thought about for some time. You rethink about them and it will develop not just your understanding but the whole community's understanding of physics, physics itself. What we can offer is routes to development, professional development through our network coordinators, and also support. So we've got various mechanisms for support. I'll say more about those in a moment. What we think about physics itself, well, you won't be surprised to know that we like it. We think that it's deeply rewarding. It's not a bunch of content. It's not stuff that you have to learn, which is perhaps society's view of physics. It's a set of ways of thinking. It's looking at things in a reductionist way, making sure that things are deeply consistent, that you can't have one bit of physics contradicting another. It's often mathematical. We use models. We use empirical evidence. So we bring all of that together. That is, if you like, the method of physics and it leads to the content. We know a lot about the world because people have used those ideas, those ways of thinking before. But physics goes beyond what has been discovered. It is those ways of thinking and that's why I think it's a cultural entitlement because if you teach children to think like that, it is a richly and continually rewarding experience for them. Although I don't particularly practice physics anymore, I'm glad that I have all the tools that I came away with. I look at the world in a different way. It is an intellectual reward. So I'm sure that you'll all agree that there's nothing as satisfying as a physics explanation. Mainly agree. Okay. So in the education department, the work we do, we work in policy. So a lot of it in recruitment. We've had some successes working with the government on changing the way that physics teachers are recruited, including the scholarships that were introduced about four years ago. Some of you may have benefited from them. We work on the curriculum, trying to bring in those ideas I just mentioned. We look at the assessment schemes and we, I think, try to keep the awarding organisations honest a little bit if we can. We also do projects and produce resources and then we have support networks. I'll say more about each of those aspects now. So our particular concerns I mentioned before is the lack of specialist teachers. That's one big problem. So there are about 30,000 science teachers in the country. You'd expect about 10,000 to be physics specialists. It's at the order of 6,000. So it's quite a long way short. So therefore recruitment and retention is a problem for us. Incidentally, we have a much broader view of physics specialists than just a physics graduate. As long as someone has trained to be a physics teacher in some way, that makes them a physics specialist. But just sticking them in front of a class and telling them to teach physics and giving them a book is not a physics specialist. So we worry about recruitment and retention. We worry about the curriculum I mentioned. At the moment it's a bit uncultured. It's a bit a set of ideas, a set of facts that you reproduce. We would like to see a sort of thematic approach to the curriculum and assessment. And some useful drivers in accountability. If you've been in schools, you may notice, for example, at the moment there's a focus and obsession almost with C grades, D to C grade. So that driver came out of an accountability measure and that's a shame. It's a perverse driver and I guess at the time it was an unforeseen consequence of the A star to C measures. And we're particularly interested in underrepresented groups. Some socioeconomic groups and of course girls don't tend to do physics. We produce resources. So there's a list of some of the resources we do. We've just launched a physics and football resource with Arsenal Football Club. So it's an after school activity. We've got the reward cards in the bottom right there with every pun we could think of for physics. And the physics and concert resource. Exoplanets that there's a workshop on today. I should say incidentally on the reward card, just a slight aside, what we found was there was science reward. There are companies that produce these and there are science ones that exist but there weren't any physics ones. And this is one of our continual battles, I think, is to get the identity of physics into schools, to get past the subject called science, the invented subject called science. There are the sciences of which physics is one, but the idea that science as a whole is one subject has probably been, hasn't served the A levels terribly well, or the country. And we have made some posters actually, the best physics education posters ever made in the world. And you may think that I'm overstating it there but I'm going to take a vote on that in a minute. So I mentioned earlier about the bigger picture, the experience of having been a physicist. We wanted something that wasn't about careers, that wasn't about stuff or engineering or what physicists do. And we came up with this phrase of physics, see the world differently. So if you've studied physics to any level, your outlook will always be slightly different. And then we wanted to represent that on some posters. So this one, we've got a character in the bottom left who's using a telescope. We could say that that's an artifact from physics but it does let you see the world differently. You look through a telescope, it looks different. And this character is looking through it at the moon so he's seeing a world differently in a sense there. He's looking at the moon, so we've got two so far. And then the bit that will blow your mind is that this poster glows in the dark. So in the dark it looks like that. So you turn the lights out and it changes like that and you are seeing the poster, the world, the poster differently. Now the character is on the moon so it's a different outlook and what's he looking at? It's the blooming world. So he is seeing the world differently. Five takes on seeing the world differently. I want to show of hands, best physics education poster ever made in the history of the universe. There we go, the unanimous. Excellent. And you've all got it even more. There you are. Are they excited? It's kicking off, kicking off on Bedford Way. A little hint with it is if you've got a UV torch at school it's worth charging it up. If you're going to demonstrate it by turning the lights out it's worth just giving it a charge before the lesson with the UV torch and just kind of stimulates the ink so it will glow better. Okay, other things we do, we support teachers so I mentioned the teacher network. The 50 physics network co-ordinators around the country. If you go to the website, ip.org, you will be taken to a map and you can find your nearest one. We have the stimulating physics network I mentioned. We've got mentoring so I'm hoping that quite a lot of you are going to be mentored. You will have a connection with one of our field workers. It might be a PNC or a TLC, that's a physics network co-ordinator on the top or a teaching and learning coach. Please do use them. Use them for subject stuff. If you're worried about how to teach something or you need some ideas, do contact your mentor. They will be able to help you. We have affiliated schools so when you move into a school you can find out if it's affiliated. You will be getting resources and discounts from us and a termally magazine, Classroom Physics. We have a forum where we bring people together. Actually we've got a meeting a week on Saturday to talk about policy so we need to connect with teachers. Probably not initially, but when you get a bit further into your career if you want to join with us more closely then please do join the Education Forum and you can come and have an influence on the way we work and the way we work with outside agencies. Talk Physics is our community forum online. You may, I hope, have seen it already. If you haven't, it's talkphysics.org. You can have discussions, watch other people having discussions. Good way to pick up hints and tips. We've also got the SBT resources for Key Stage 3 so deep narrative resource for talking through how and why and what you might say to children about physics. Teaching Advanced Physics, TAP resources is also on our website. These are all linked at the end as well and Practical Physics with, as you might expect, lots of ideas for practicals. We've run some pilot projects. We're currently doing some pilot projects on improving gender balance, so we've got 20 schools we're working with and then a project looking at the whole school issue of gender balance. So not a physics project, but it is our conviction now that children are stereotyped by gender by the age of 11 and then even secondary schools don't tend to counter that. So that plays into physics, but it's a broader problem. The roles that boys and girls are given are male and female and we're deeply concerned about that. We're trying to address it. And then also socio-economic background I mentioned earlier. We did a pilot project on ethnicity. This is a harder problem to work with because it isn't a straightforward in and out. There are many different influences and issues with people from different ethnic backgrounds taking physics. So there isn't a single thing we can address. Why we're doing it, so I mentioned earlier about it being the cultural entitlement. We don't obsess about numbers of children doing A-level physics but it is a useful thermometer. It gives it a sort of measure of the state of the system. So you can see in the mid-80s about 45,000 students did A-level physics. And that crashed down to a low in 2006 of about 28,000. It's a massive drop-off. You can see the other scientists incidentally were benefitting. This correlates almost exactly to the invention of a subject called science that I mentioned before and the ability therefore of schools to recruit science teachers rather than physics, chemistry and biology teachers. So when we look at the same data for individual schools we can identify schools again as a thermometer where not many children are going on to take A-level physics so we would reckon there's some issue there. And remember it's not just the five or six who might have done A-level, it's the whole 200 in a year group have had such a bad experience of physics that none of them have wanted to do it at A-level. So it's a whole year group, a whole school that isn't getting that cultural entitlement. And what we tend to find is they will have a shortage of physics specialists in those schools and the culture of physics has died in that school. There are about 500 schools that fall into that category, out of three and a half thousand so it's about a sixth. So you can see it's a real problem. This is a sixth of the population and not getting the cultural entitlement that we talked about before or I talked about before. And therefore children aren't getting an identification with the subject, they're not seeing the subject in its full glory. The other things that we worry about I mentioned diversity so 49% of mixed maintained schools nearly half but for 1% of mixed maintained schools send no girls on to take A-level physics. So that is a scandal. Whatever is happening in those schools girls are getting a message that physics is not for them. And of course we know that to be not the case. So much of what we do is driven by ensuring this cultural entitlement. There we are. So please do enjoy today. Go into teaching. I mentioned earlier incidentally that there was nothing as satisfying as a physics explanation. I didn't do a hands up on that one just in case. Just in case everyone put their hand up. But what you were thinking at the time was do you know there is something more satisfying than physics explanation and that's giving a physics explanation. That is the most satisfying thing in the world. So I hope you have many years of that satisfaction. Keep in touch with us. Locate your nearest physics network coordinator and have a good time today. I've got some links at the end. Joe is raring to go. There we are. Thank you very much.