IOP and Ogden Trust share physics education insights at House of Lords

The IOP and Ogden Trust joined forces today at a House of Lords event to share insights from practice on key educational issues and to suggest what can be done at policy level to address them.

The poster conference and information exchange event – Education: Insights from Practice for Policy – provided an opportunity for educators, community-based organisations, charities, members of parliament and the House of Lords to come together and discuss educational issues on a large scale.

Rachel Hartley, Strategic Lead for Pedagogy and Professional Practice, Institute of Physics (IOP), and Jackie Flaherty, Head of Teaching and Learning at The Ogden Trust, co-presented their poster ‘Physics teachers – a force multiplier for marginalised young people’.

The poster highlights how meeting teacher recruitment, retention and retraining needs will address some of the key barriers that prevent young people from marginalised groups accessing the opportunities that physics offers.

It also calls for investment in targeted recruitment campaigns and scholarships to attract a more diverse community of physicists into teaching. 

Improvements to teacher retention could also be made through mentorship/supervision programmes and further supportive networks for physics teachers. These would sit alongside ‘turbocharging’ the provision of subject-specific professional learning that focuses on inclusive pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching practices for all physics educators.

And the poster also suggests some quick wins that could improve access to specialist physics teaching for all young people.

_{Jackie Flaherty (left) and Rachel Hartley} 

Rachel Hartley said: “Physics opens doors to a wide range of rewarding careers and further study but sadly many young people from marginalised groups in the UK are missing out. Children from disadvantaged areas are much less likely to have a physics specialist teacher and take physics post-16, but they are the ones who would benefit the most. We are calling for the government to invest in physics teachers and address this inequity.”

The IOP will be launching a report later in 2025, focusing on the challenges and opportunities across recruitment, retention and retraining.

The poster conference was hosted by The Centre for Research into the Education of Marginalised Children and Young Adults (CREMCYA), based at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.