Who Aspires to a Science Career? A Comparison of Survey Responses from Primary and Secondary School Students

  1. For many students, positive attitudes to school science and positive parental attitudes to science are not translating into children wanting a career in science. The authors suggest that differences in ‘science capital’ may help explain this persistent gap.
  2. Their analyses show that aspirations from Y6 to Y9 are indeed patterned by structure (c.f. their findings related to gender, ethnicity and cultural capital) while at the same time not being deterministic.
  3. The picture presented by their analyses is of a degree of consistency (but not fixity) within young people’s aspirations from age 10 to age 14, with these aspirations being reliably patterned by social identities and inequalities, whilst also shaped by parental/family factors and young people’s experiences of school science.
  4. Students in the Year 6 and Year 9 samples with strong aspirations in science were more likely to be male, from ethnic minority backgrounds and have high levels of cultural capital. They were also more likely than those without such strong aspirations to do well in science (not surprisingly) and to have exposure to a science-related career through family.
  5. The discrepancy between the current profile of STEM graduates and the high proportion of minority ethnic students aged 10-14 aspiring to a career in science also alerts to some potential inequalities. The analyses suggest that a ‘lack of aspirations’ is not the main barrier to minority ethnic participation in post-compulsory STEM education.
  6. With regard to school science, survey data highlighted that students in Year 6 and in Year 9 value school science and feel they can do well in it. However, while they are still generally positive about their lessons, Year 9 students do report enjoying them less than Year 6 students.
  7. The doing/being divide, or the discrepancy between attitudes related to aspirations and the aspirations themselves, seems to remain persistent- it is certainly not diminishing in older age groups. It would seem that a complex mechanism is likely to underpin the formation and maintenance of occupational aspirations, which rely on and indicate an ability to imagine oneself in a particular type of career rather than just being determined directly by broadly positive experiences in school or parental attitudes.
  8. Girls and students with lower levels of cultural capital had lower mean scores on the attitudes to school science variable. Such a pattern suggests the possibility that something happening in the science lessons themselves is operating not only to reduce enjoyment but also to produce unequal patterns of aspirations and, later, post-16 participation.
  9. As with attitudes to school science, reported parental attitudes to science remained positive across the surveys, suggesting that these positive attitudes do not invariably or directly translate into student aspirations in science.
  10. The authors argue that students begin to form ideas about ‘who does science’ from a very young age and that these ideas are strongly influenced by their families and experiences of school science. The ideas and images that students encounter at school and home are likely to connect to aspirations by influencing students’ ability to imagine themselves in a science-related career.