Being Practical (Or Not)

Posted on November 9, 2025 by Athene Donald

Last week I attended a workshop on the future of practical science in schools at the Royal Society.  Driven in part by the findings of the 2023 Science Education Tracker, that students at secondary school were frustrated they had little opportunity to do hands-on work themselves, as opposed to watching either the teacher do an experiment, or simply a video of that experiment, the meeting explored different aspects of the issue for both primary and secondary schools. The meeting was held, as it happened, the day before the publication of the Curriculum and Assessment Review. However, when the 197 pages of the report did land (metaphorically) on desks, its remarks about school practical science were somewhat bland. Recognizing that ‘practical work is not always effective’ it recommends that:

‘practical science activity – focused on high-quality teacher demonstration and hands on work by pupils – be underpinned by clearly defined purposes in the Programmes of Study and GCSE subject content.’

One can hardly disagree with such a statement, but it could be argued that is more about prescription for the teacher than feeding curiosity in the student.

When I think about my own school science days – as I was encouraged to do when talking about my personal experiences in the opening talk of the meeting – our lessons, as far as I recall, were largely based around ‘doing’ science. Right from the beginning of secondary school we were expected to do experiments, involving things such as dilute acids (no goggles provided) and open flames from Bunsen burners with tripods and asbestos mats. It was a different world, in which health and safety was not visibly considered, although I don’t remember any significant accidents. Lessons consisted of a teacher starting off with some explanations and then we were set loose. We had plenty of opportunity to explore and get used to apparatus.

In my talk, I discussed the A Level Physics course I had done, a new course just getting underway from the Nuffield Foundation at that time. It must have been very demanding on our teacher, since – as a pilot – she only got the material to teach a few weeks beforehand. There were no textbooks, everything came in a loose-leaf file. One of the innovative ways of working was to carry out an extended investigation. Having read The New Science of Strong Materials by JE Gordon (an inspiring book, then as now, and one I wrote about back in the days when the Guardian had science blogs, because it was so influential on me) to supplement the work on materials we did, I chose to attempt to replicate one of the key experiments described there. That was on glass fibres and related to fracture mechanics. The theoretical details don’t matter, but when preparing my talk I went back to look at those teenage diaries I referred to in my last post. Of this attempt at independent experimentation, I wrote:

This time I did some work on glass fibres – and I managed to burn myself while making one – not very badly, but inconveniently.

Nobody seemed too bothered about this accident.

Let’s face it, I was then – and throughout my career – not very dexterous. I broke things repeatedly during my PhD, and my experiences with chemistry were equally unfortunate. Again, my diary tells the tale:

‘Had our first chemistry practical. We did some titration and I swallowed some sodium hydroxide when trying to pipette it, but although nasty not serious.’

By the time I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate, and finding myself needing to continue with Chemistry to my annoyance, I hadn’t got much better with my hands.  This time quoting from a letter to my mother, I described my first undergraduate practical lab:

‘I got myself well and truly stained bright yellow by a salt of picric acid all over my hands (I should have been wearing gloves but took them off to wash up some apparatus). Also on my face, since I kept touching my face when adjusting safety goggles.’

I literally lived to tell the tale, and I don’t really want to know whether the salt was cancerous or explosive or any of the other things I’ve been told.

However, amusing and embarrassing though these anecdotes may be, the reality is science in my day was full of practical work at least from secondary school on (there was nothing that was described as science at my primary). It was striking how many people in the Royal Society audience last week had also done one or more of the Nuffield courses of the day. Courses that had practical work at their heart, in stark contrast to what schools can offer now. Everything from a packed curriculum, to teachers having to teach outside their specialism and therefore comfort zone; from lack of space to lack of cash; and from school accountability measures to absence of crucial equipment, practical science just doesn’t have the same focus in science lessons today as in my own, often as not. Yet, as the most recent Science Education Tracker shows, students miss being able to do their own practical work. It was a motivating factor for students wanting to do science for more than half of those in KS3. By making that a rare treat rather than something that they can routinely expect to engage in, we are turning students off pursuing science thereafter.

What many students get regularly as part of their lessons is watching a video demonstration. It may in principle have the same learning outcomes as doing the identical experiment themselves, but in practice almost certainly it will be less memorable and not give them ‘muscle memory’ of how to do things. Or, as in my case, how not to do things. The Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) had little to say about these matters. It explicitly states it won’t be discussing the teacher workforce. Yet, a science teacher who is teaching outside their own speciality, may not have the confidence to talk around a video to help the students understand what is going on, let alone have the resources or the confidence to do the experiment themselves. The evidence the conference was presented with showed that – in terms of student learning – a well-prepared and judiciously commented on video or, even better, teacher demonstration can be very effective for learning. But passively watching a demonstration with no additional elucidation from the teacher is not.

School practicals should feed curiosity as well as learning. Finding out what doesn’t work and why and how to use key apparatus ought to be central to the science curriculum. Unless schools are enabled – through adequate funding, curriculum time and supply of teachers in each of the sciences – to deliver effective practical work, we are short-changing our students, whether or not they are going to be the scientists of the future. It is disappointing that the CAR had so little to say about this.

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Is That What Makes Me Human?

Posted on November 2, 2025 by Athene Donald

I have been reading the recently published book AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard. I found it a fascinating – and indeed optimistic – book, which prompted a lot of reflection, although not directly because I’ve been exploring AI myself. I haven’t (at least as yet), but the underlying theme of what it takes to be human resonated with me, even without the AI bit. I may have more to say about other aspects of the book another time, but for the moment I want to pause and think about one of the many questions the book poses:

What remains uniquely mine? – Name the experiences, feelings or qualities that can’t be captured by algorithms.

Thinking about what is ‘uniquely mine’ I would hazard a guess is not something many of us dwell on too often, at least if our primary focus is science. However, that sentiment certainly gave me pause for thought. I looked up and around the room I work in, and my eyes fell on the objects casually sitting on and around one of the (many) bookcases in the room in which I now ‘work’ (given I’m retired). It struck me how much these are symbols of the people and things that matter to me, or who have contributed to who I am. A strange collection they happen to be, but feeding into my being.

There is a conductor’s baton. This belonged to my grandmother who, in my teenage years, expended much effort every autumn on being part of running a conductors’ school; my grandparents lived with us. This was a weeklong course for those who lead things like WI choirs and other amateur bodies. My grandmother was undoubtedly musical, and right to the end would play Chopin mazurkas and polonaises with great panache but, in my lifetime, I never knew her conduct anything. Nevertheless, when we cleared my mother’s house after her death, this baton turned up and I couldn’t bear to throw it out.

Most of the other items on this bookshelf were also tied to that house-emptying, along with some of the books on the shelf itself. How can one throw out appalling Victorian tracts given to a great- or even great-grandmother as a Sunday school prize, for attendance or good behaviour? I can’t imagine reading the actual books, but inscribed books have sentiment attached it’s hard to dispose of.  Then there are a couple of pieces of damaged porcelain that were always part of my childhood. Perhaps they were valuable once, but they surely aren’t in their damaged state. I suspect anything actually valuable of this ilk was sold when we were on our beam-ends when I was around 10 and bankruptcy stalked the family.

Perhaps the item I treasure most is a print of brent geese by the naturalist, broadcaster and artist Peter Scott, dated 1939. I remember buying this – a scruffy somewhat crumpled print at the time, unframed – at a jumble sale (as I say, money was tight) for my mother’s birthday when I was a young teenager. She kept it by her bed all her life, and I treasure it because she treasured it. We brought it back to our house, and now that it is flattened and suitably framed it looks rather good. It reminds me of the days she and I used to go out birdwatching, including with the London Natural History Society’s coach trips to the Essex and Kent mudflats where we often saw brent geese. An atmospheric painting, bringing back memories of freezing cold days at the coast. But they were happy days out to places we’d never have got to without the LNHS (my mother never drove).
brent geeseHanging over the bookshelf is a penguin mobile that we must have given my daughter as a small child. It hung in her room till she left home. Indeed, it hung in her empty room gathering dust for many years and I rescued it before our house was gutted and refurbished, and now here it is.

The final item is a bronze (?) figurine of a woman standing tall and empowered. It’s about 30cm tall and very heavy. This was given to me by colleagues in the University when I stood down as the Gender Equality Champion as a vote of thanks. It meant a lot to me that they had clubbed together to give me this as a measure of appreciation for what I’d done, or at least tried to do, to support women across the university. It definitely symbolises empowerment and was created by a local artist.

So, in some ways that is a summary of significant parts of my life and the fact that I’ve kept these objects must say something about me. Is that what makes me human, because an algorithm probably wouldn’t have collected a random array like this? At least, I assume not.

Of course, that is by no means all of my past that I treasure and which I keep upstairs in nooks and crannies. There’s also my school attaché case, given to me when I was still at primary school and which – I suspect – I took in every day rather than the traditional satchel. It contains much of my past too, in the form of letters from my husband before we were married, the single letter from my father I still have with me, and my childish diaries. Curiously I had recourse to these this week: preparing a talk for the Royal Society’s meeting on practical science at school on Tuesday, I was amused to look back at what I wrote about my own days of school practicals. Suffice it to say, I was not good at them and safety issues were less on people’s minds then than now. I once nearly set fire to the chemistry lab and I had this to say about my first A Level chemistry lesson:

We did some titration and I swallowed some sodium hydroxide when trying to pipette it, but although nasty not serious.

I lived to tell the tale, and to gather all these memories – solid and ephemeral – around me. Is that what makes me human?

 

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Civic Responsibilities

Posted on October 26, 2025 by Athene Donald

Innovate Cambridge Summit 2025 The University Vice Chancellor Debbie Prentice, with Lord Patrick Vallance and Minister Pennycook at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit

This week saw various significant announcements for and from the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge region and the wider so-called Ox-Cam Corridor. Starting with the last, £500M has been pledged for investment in new homes, infrastructure and business space by the Government for the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor. Most of this money is coming to the Cambridge city region. Improving local infrastructure (housing, water and transport in particular) is vital if growth is to be possible. Those in the north of England may wonder why Cambridge is favoured but, as Minister Pennycook stated clearly at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit, the Government sees the Corridor as crucial in being able to stimulate the economy of the whole UK. Or, as Lord Vallance (also present this week) is quoted in the Government’s press release:

‘These investments are a milestone, not just for the Oxford to Cambridge Corridor, but for the entire country. We are going to deliver the housing, amenities and infrastructure that businesses need to grow and that people need to flourish. This region has all the ingredients to be the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley or the Boston Cluster: somewhere that turns world-class innovation into economic growth the whole nation benefits from.’

Within this new money, £15M has been put aside for an innovation hub to drive growth, alongside the necessary infrastructure. In terms of innovation, money was also committed earlier this summer to develop the Cambridge x Manchester Innovation Partnership – the first trans-UK innovation collaboration of its kind – funded with £4.8M from Research England, so that there is a direct connection  between the Cambridge city region and Manchester, one vehicle to ensure the north of England does receive some benefit. Both the University of Cambridge and the University of Manchester are committing further funds of their own to this enterprise.

The Innovate Cambridge Summit covered these plans and much more. One key message that has sat at the heart of the work of Innovate Cambridge since its start is the importance of inclusion. That Cambridge is the most unequal city in the country was highlighted by many speakers during the day, with a call for action to make sure that innovation and growth benefit the whole community. The Cambridge Pledge, an initiative driven by Innovate Cambridge, is a shared commitment to channel wealth and innovation into lasting social good: companies that create wealth in the city through innovation are called upon to pledge some of their future profits.

For many Cambridge residents, the University may seem a remote, forbidding organisation not accessible to people ‘like them’, and who probably don’t expect the inequalities they face every day to go away any time soon. In an important new venture, the University is aiming to change both the perception and the reality for the whole community. The day before the Innovation Summit, the University had launched its Civic Framework, which is the outcome of a ‘listening exercise’ conducted over the past months. When asked to describe the University in three words, the most common words local residents used were historic, prestigious and excellence, but also and less attractively, elite. There was a range of other worryingly negative words such as arrogant, remote, exclusive and entitled. Nearly half the respondents felt the University did badly at communicating its research.

Under the banner People, Place, Partnership: Civic priorities for the University of Cambridge the University pledges to improve with four underpinning civic principles:

  • Equity, inclusion and belonging;
  • Collaboration and mutual benefit;
  • Transparency and learning
  • Sustainable impact

Of course the proof of the pudding will be in the delivery. In three years’ time, will local residents be more inclined to use words such as inclusive and transparent rather than exclusive and remote?

I have argued before (and also here and here) that universities have a responsibility for training youth who are not aiming at university, but perhaps at something technical and/or vocational. I am delighted to see that amongst the actions the University is proposing under its Civic Missions is one to develop skills including youth opportunities. Opening up its training programmes to more apprentices – whether they end up working in the University or elsewhere in the local innovation ecosystem – strikes me as a minimal action the University can take. Ensuring that T-Level students have the necessary placement is another ‘easy’ step. Academics and staff who have the charisma to inspire the young in the less advantaged areas around the city region, not just the city schools themselves, need to get out more to share their love for their discipline or work more generally. It is not sufficient to run a Festival of Ideas that local middle-class families attend, fun and thought-provoking though that may be, but the net must be cast far more widely.

If transport links around the city really do improve, we can hope to see easier access into the city from Fenland villages, where job opportunities may be scant, so it becomes all the more important that training opportunities are available within the University, and that this fact becomes widely known. Of course, it’s not just the University of Cambridge. Anglia Ruskin University is already active in this area. I hope – from the discussions held earlier this year – more local companies will feel able to take on such youth training opportunities, facilitated by the Opportunities Hub that is being set up through Cambridge University Health Partners which aims to cover this strand and much more. Some funding has been obtained to get this initiative under way.

It is encouraging that the University is focussing on its civic responsibilities. I look forward to seeing both the local economy flourish and infrastructure improve as the OxCam Corridor funding flows in, and the local youth feeling included in the benefits that derive from the investment.

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Mrs Handley and the Whippets (Learning to be Difficult)

Posted on October 19, 2025 by Athene Donald

No, not the name of a pop-group (although it might be quite a good one), but an episode from my early life. In later life I’m sure people had me in the category of those difficult women I wrote about last week, but by and large at school I was a goody-goody who (as my mother continued to say long after I’d become a professor) couldn’t say boo to a goose. I was, in general, not one for breaking school rules, unlike those who will remain nameless who put potassium permanganate in our school’s water tank, or who were constantly disruptive in the classroom. However, just occasionally, I found the backbone to tackle what I thought was unfair behaviour on the part of the teaching staff. The occasion with Mrs Handley and her whippets was one such occasion.

Carol Handley was, at the time, deputy head of my secondary school, Camden School for Girls. She later became Head of the School before retiring to Cambridge (sadly, I never met her in the city, and only discovered around the time of her death that she had been a Fellow at Wolfson College. Her husband, Eric Handley, had been the Regius Professor of Greek). She taught classics, although she never taught me.

The episode I’m referring to occurred one day in May many years ago when many of us, so-called fifth years, were about to take our O Levels (the GCSE’s of the day). We were feeling disgruntled. We had just been told we would not, as was the norm and as we had expected, be able to revise at home between our different exams but would have to come into school for lessons. I was clearly not the only one who felt very put out by this announcement. I suspect, being the nerdy swot I was (think of how Hermione Granger tackled revision), I probably had a neatly drawn up schedule of when I would revise what: the need to be sure I knew the appropriate chemical reactions and could tell a gerund from a gerundive (neither of which I would like to be tested on now). My diary of the time simply says ‘we got all the 5th formers together’ and went to see Mrs Handley.

All the 5th formers would have been approaching a hundred pupils, so I’m sure that’s an overstatement but still, a lot of us went find her in some classroom, and my memory is that I was the ring-leader, although that’s not written down precisely in my childish script. With her was – unusually, I don’t ever recall another appearance of a dog in the school – a sick whippet, which clearly was too ill to have been left at home and was sitting in a small basket on the desk at the front of the class (I suspect both her whippets were involved, but only one was unwell). We argued the case to her that we would all accomplish more revision quietly by ourselves at home, rather than dragging ourselves into the school for a teacher to decide collectively what we were in most need of thinking about. My diary notes ‘she is on our side now’.

However, the next time we saw our form teacher she was livid. (Incidentally, she was also a classicist, although again not one who taught me; we must have had a lot of Latin teachers in our school at the time, given everyone did Latin from arriving at the school at 11, although I think doing it at O Level probably wasn’t compulsory). ‘Irresponsible’ she said, particularly given the sick whippet. Why the latter was relevant I’m not sure, since we did it no harm, were not rowdy and did not shout. Nor did it seem to bother Mrs Handley at the time, but apparently by this point the furore had escalated to the head teacher, Doris Burchell (head 1946-68), who was now ‘against us’.

A couple of days later, a suitable compromise was found: we didn’t get the full time away from school we’d initially expected, but we got three more days than the interim plan had proposed. I suppose everyone could feel they’d won. I never felt Mrs Handley held this against me – in due course she was extremely helpful to me in a very different situation, but that’s not my story to tell. I’m sure I felt we, collectively, had done the right thing and that gathering everyone together to put our case calmly and on good didactic grounds had been totally responsible, despite what our form teacher claimed.

I’m not sure if that encouraged me to become stroppier. On the whole I continued in my nerdish way, but the next year I had occasion to make a different fuss which had zero didactic basis. I felt, in this episode, the school was being unfair and unreasonable and I took them to task over what felt like the illogicality of their position. These school-years of mine were at the height of the mini-skirt craze, and the school had rules about what length our skirts (no trousers; such a thing was never even considered) our uniform had to be. I can’t remember what the answer was, I didn’t have either the thighs or the daring to go for the shortest of skirts, but it was clear they thought longer was better. However, when I and one other girl turned up in a maxi coat, essentially floor length, this was deemed unsuitable and ‘against the rules’.

By this point I was in the sixth form doing A Levels, and we didn’t have to wear uniform at all, so that in the first instance this felt a bit odd anyhow. However, I can imagine on health and safety grounds (although such a phrase was not in common parlance back then), long skirts in a lab – where of course I spent quite a lot of my time – might have been thought a hazard. But this was a coat, worn solely to get me to and from school. What risk was there in that? What rule were they suddenly inventing to stop me wearing this coat I was so proud of? (I was so proud of it, I loved it dearly, that I only got rid of it a few years ago once the moths had had a good chew, although I rarely wore it in the relatively recent past). I argued the toss – and won. This felt like a jobsworth kind of unconsidered reaction to something unexpected, and I think they swiftly realised that they did not have a leg to stand on.

So, despite my mother’s attestations to my teenage son that I couldn’t say boo to a goose, at least until my 20’s, that clearly wasn’t quite accurate. Push me too far and I could be forceful. That does not mean that I take kindly to the phrase, said to me all too often, that I’m ‘not a shrinking violet’. Both my last two posts touch on the words and phrased directed at women in pejorative tones, and my (and I suspect many women’s) dislike of phrases such as that, or being described as feisty was raised in many of my conversations at the WISE conference. Being a forceful woman (not aggressive, just assertive) is a perfectly fine way to act. As a teenager I was just practicing, and probably not often enough.

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Difficult Women

Posted on October 12, 2025 by Athene Donald

Behave Badly Pin Badge – Curating Cambridge

Tributes poured in following the death of Jane Goodall, with stories of her remarkable life and doings, the way she set out new paths in research and lived a different kind of life. The quoted remark of hers that most struck me was

“It doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”,

although there has subsequently been a debunking of the attribution. Nevertheless, I suspect that it is in the spirit of things she might have said, given interviews of her I have seen.

For me, that first sentence certainly rings true. Although few men of my acquaintance would admit to the fact they like women to know their place quietly in the background, I nevertheless think somehow that’s what many men around the world expect. It is just one aspect of that pernicious habit we all have of stereotyping. The trad wife may be having something of a revival, at least on the other side of the Atlantic, but will be little seen in academia: you’re not going to survive long in the cut-and-thrust world of research if you choose to fade into the background and merely bring in the cakes for celebratory teas. But there may still be an expected element of ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir’ said to the head of a team (who is statistically likely to be male), still, in almost all scientific disciplines.

There are a number of other notable women who have made this same point about being difficult in different spheres, probably far more than I know of and covering centuries. Let me just give a few not-so-distant examples. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a Harvard Professor of early American history, who used the phrase ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’ in an article she wrote, back in 1976. The phrase took on a life of its own, according to her, and she subsequently expanded on it in her book of the same title. In 2019 she reflected on this in a fascinating essay, casting the sentiment back to a poem published by Anne Bradstreet in 1650 (published in London, although she was a colonialist New England poet). Bradstreet wrote:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, …..

In other words, get back to your sewing, woman.

Moving forward to a period I lived through, let me highlight another woman, like Jane Goodall, sadly missed, Lisa Jardine. I only met her a couple of times, but she was another force of nature who, when she became the first female fellow at Jesus College in Cambridge in 1976, created badges which said ‘behave badly’. These she would give out to colleagues, such as Jane Tillier, the first woman Lay Chaplain to be appointed at the College in 1984, exhorting them not to go about their business quietly.

Of course, in our current political world, there is the example of Jess Phillips, famously pugnacious, who says of herself

‘I’m tough in most situations and I’m not afraid to speak back at people if they’re having a pop at me.’

And lots of people do have a pop at her. As she puts this in a chilling comparison with domestic abuse ‘

What happens is there’s a slow and steady buildup to control a woman – you have to be very negative about them, bring them down, groom them to a position of weakness, isolate them from people by threatening to embarrass them at work. You close them in, and then when all those bits of control are done, you escalate to violence.’

Intersectionality, as ever, makes all of this much worse with the well-worn trope Angry Black Woman particularly prevalent in the USA, with such women considered to be  ‘hostile, aggressive, overbearing, illogical, ill-tempered and bitter.’

No, women just want to be allowed to speak up without fear – but with good sense. Whether in science or anywhere else, our voices need to be heard and listened to, not treated as if we are out of line for daring to open our mouths. Too often women are spoken over, ignored or slapped down. Still. That this is ongoing was apparent from my conversations with younger women at the recent WISE conference, who were all too familiar with the sensation of men around them who weren’t necessarily willing to listen. Who might additionally mark a woman down for speaking up. I fear, if the ructions in the USA spread over here, those sensations may only grow.

Apart from the potential of damaging one’s career, speaking up in the face of negativity or worse, can be extremely tiring. There are times when any fighter, in any situation, may prefer to go and hide in a corner and nurse their wounds. It takes energy from the day job, such as research or teaching. It takes time away from the actions that might lead to progression, be it writing papers or attending conferences. By fighting one’s corner there are many ways in which one’s career may be jeopardised, or at the very least hindered. But if we don’t speak up, then nothing will change. I know I have the luxury of no longer having a career to worry about, but Lisa Jardine did not when she was first elected as a junior research fellow all those years ago. By encouraging others, as well as herself, to ‘behave badly’, she paved the way for all the women research fellows who came later to have a voice and a status.

Many of us will be marked down as ‘difficult’, or indeed as feisty, not a shrinking violet, unpredictable, outspoken – at this point you should insert your own particular bête noire phrase, because most readers will know what gets under their skin if they speak up. This, of course, can happen to men too, but somehow the vocabulary is usually different, with words like feisty rarely applied to a man. It may not inherently be pejorative but, when tossed in my direction, I have always felt that was the message conveyed. However, being difficult is, too often, the only way for change to happen. The parsing of ‘women are aggressive while men are assertive’ may linger under so much of this, but that’s not a reason to stop putting one’s case without fear.

 

 

 

 

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