Outreach - Inspiring a new generation

The importance of bringing physics teaching and inspiration to generations of students in schools cannot be underestimated, and the health of our society may in the long-run depend on our ability to engage school students in science. There are critical problems now in our nation's schools owing to an acute lack of physics teachers with physics degrees. We must engage schoolchildren, both to inspire them to study science and, increasingly, to support and provide teaching material directly.

The Cavendish has an active outreach programme which runs on little more than our students' and faculty's expertise, energy and desire to share their passion for their subject in an invitational and accessible way. Despite very little external support, a full-time Cavendish outreach officer runs programmes such as 'Physics at Work', which bring around 2,000 school pupils to visit the Department over a 3-day period; a week-long residential programme for 60 Year 11 students called 'Physics with the maths put back in', which was so successful that we could double it in size; and various other forms of support including courses and training materials for teachers.

With support, we could do much more to transmit to school children a sense of the meaning and importance of science, and increase the quality and size of the pool for undergraduate recruitment in the physical sciences and mathematics. For more information, please contact us.