@TkH111
"...in my degree in Engineering, the lecturers don't have time in the curriculum to spend additional time bringing up substandard students that didn't do so well in their GCSE and A level exams"
And those kids A-Level teachers didn't have the time to deal with the kids that weren't up to speed from GCSE, and their GCSE teachers didn't have time to deal with the kids that weren't up to speed from KS2, etc. Basically what you;re saying is, it doesn't matter how capable you are, if you got a bum deal in Year 2 with an incompetent teacher and as a result couldn't do maths as well as your mates in other classes you can say farewell to any kind of STEM degree and resultant career?
*Someone* needs to play catch up with the kids that through no fault of their own got left behind. You were lucky - others aren't.
Another failing with your argument is that it does not solve the issue with the number of STEM graduates. If we decide to leave kids in A-Levels until they are 24 starting in Sept this year, nobody goes to uni to do the more challenging courses for 3-5 years. Guess what happens to those courses? They don't get run any more. The departments shrink/close, so we end up with a bunch of kids that at age 24 can now study the subjects, but no actual courses for them to go to.
The causal factors of this whole issue are numerous and complicated. They include (but are not limited to) -
> school league tables directly leading to teaching to spec (rather than teaching skills);
> government focus on high results at GCSE leading to an unreasonably large gap between GCSE and A-Level;
> large class sizes;
> parenting ("teaching is the schools job not mine");
> toothless discipline (expelling students is not only extremely difficult and resource intensive, but is done on a swap basis - you get rid of one, you get one, so you still have huge disruption issues);
> p*ss poor sci specs from the exam boards;
> poor working conditions for teachers.
Science has always been the maligned subject nobody wants to talk about. If you want evidence, just look at the the governments GCSE KPI - "5 GCSEs at A-C including maths and english". Ummm, so where;s the science? Any school with half a brain at it's head is going to spend its money on maths and english to boost its ranking, knowing that plenty of kids will get 3 other easy GCSEs to go with them. Science gets left behind because it's too hard and too expensive to ensure the majority of kids do well in it.
Getting great teachers in to the profession isn't terribly easy anyway (you need to spend another year either at uni which costs you fees, and you don't have a wage, or as a GTP candidate), but keeping them is impossible. If you;re that good, why get paid £21k a year to have kids not bother doing their work, treat you with disrespect, occasionally threaten you with scissors, destroy the teaching and learning materials you spent your weekend (unpaid) making (having bought the mats with your own money), and then their parents whining that their kid didn;t get an A* (even tho he has yet to hand in a single piece of homework, or go one lesson without going on BBM, or checking Facespace) (all real world examples).
If they want lots more kids in STEM it's fairly simple to set a framework where it will happen, but it's political dynamite. You need to legislate to control the exam boards, give teachers more powers, and (this is never going to happen) pay them a wage that will keep the best teachers in the job.
Barclays et al complain that if they didn;t pay their best employees £200k in bonuses they would walk. Teachers on the other hand are just expected to suck it up, then we complain when our kids don;t do as well as we'd hoped. Guess what? If you pay someone less than they can get elsewhere for doing less work, they're gonna walk. That leaves you with the teachers that can't get a job elsewhere, or hope they can make a difference. We all know where the last type end up, and it ain;t pretty.
If the gov actually want more quality STEM graduates then they can do something about it (at a cost obviously). However we all know they just want to talk about it and wring their hands - it's so much easier and cheaper.