If you believe the headlines in the educational press, the state of science education in Britain has swung markedly from the parlous to something that might be interpreted as approaching the positive. The roots of all this lie buried in a February press release from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS). It provides in great detail the number of applications for university courses in 1997, together with comparable figures for 1996. Among much else, the figures revealed applications for physics to be up by 8 .7 per cent (16185 to 17 595), while biochemistry shows a 9.3 per cent increase (10 978 to 12 004), biology a 1.8 per cent increase (30 468 to 31 017), and chemistry a 0.1 per cent increase (20 381 to 20 397).
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