This collaborative session invites teachers and leaders to reflect on practical science models that are realistic, workable and educationally valuable. It will explore how practical assessment and practical learning can be designed in ways that support classroom delivery, gather meaningful feedback and balance ambition with the operational realities schools face.
Participants will also explore what makes practical science both educationally valuable and operationally manageable; to surface the barriers schools face in delivering practical science well; and to discuss models that could improve consistency, feasibility and learner experience. Participants will leave with a set of practical design considerations, examples of alternative delivery models and prompts for reviewing practical science in their own context.
Aims of this session: > To raise awareness of the link between the primary National Curriculum content and the lived experiences of children and families. > To help delegates pre-empt potentially emotive issues within the science National Curriculum and consider sensitive pedagogical responses.
Emotive issues in science, really? Science is often considered to be a fact-based subject; we don’t always anticipate that science lessons may evoke emotional responses from children (or their families).
During this session, we aim to consider the primary science curriculum through the eyes of a child who may find some topics challenging. These are not always the topics that we expect, and there are more than you might think. If you’re a child who does not live with biological relations, how do lessons on inherited traits in humans feel to you? If your parents struggle to afford good-quality food, what do activities highlighting a healthy diet mean to you?
We will consider how topics such as these can be addressed with sensitivity in the classroom without watering down or avoiding the scientific content.
Outcomes: Delegates will be introduced to a different mindset when teaching science. Delegates should be able to identify aspects of the primary National Curriculum which may evoke an emotional response or cause unintended upset to the children they teach and their families. Delegates should leave the session with some ideas about how they would/would not teach potentially emotive topics.
We are experienced teacher educators who have supported student teachers to get to grips with the science National Curriculum. We have also sat with students who have regretted the approaches they took in lessons when they taught the science curriculum in a factually correct way but did not fully consider the lived experiences of the children they teach. This prompted us to develop a taught session, called ‘Teaching science with sensitivity’, which we deliver to all our trainees. Feedback from students is always positive, and we would be keen to share our work with a wider audience. In doing so, we appreciate that many delegates have rich experience that they could contribute to discussion within the session.
Topics that we include are:
The human body, including physical differences, the importance of exercise, a healthy diet, hygiene/dental health and hygiene, drugs and alcohol. Potential concerns: Body differences, body image, addiction within the family, and the impact of socio-economic backgrounds.
Living, dead and things that have never been alive - Potential concern: death. Food chains – Potential concern: awareness of the brutality of predation. Fossils and evolution - Potential concern: conflict with science and families’ cultural/religious beliefs. Living things and their habitats, life cycles and reproduction - Potential concern: sustainability/habitat destruction. Inheritance and Selection – Potential concern: upset caused to children who do not live with their biological parents.
Science is a powerful process that gives structure to our innate ability to find patterns in the world around us.
Patterns observed by Galileo only make sense if our model for the solar system is Sun-centred.
Come explore the Patterns in the Solar System, Perimeter Institute’s newest free classroom resource. Engage in activities to explore Galileo’s observations, identify patterns, and think scientifically.
Learning and Skills Manager, IOP and Perimeter Institute
I was a teacher of physics in Scotland for over 30 years before becoming the Scottish Education Manager for IOP in February 2019. Throughout this time I have been active in curriculum and assessment development and providing professional learning for teachers. I am a former Chair... Read More →
Subject Knowledge for Physics Teaching (SKPT) coursesare delivered by The Ogden Trust in partnership with STEM Learning and are fully funded by the Department for Education, to provide free physics professional development for teachers teaching physics outside their specialism.
Delivered by an expert practitioner in a supportive learning community, teachers build their competence and confidence to bring physics to life in the classroom.
The programme is delivered in a range of formats that best meet the needs and requirements of schools and teachers.
Pop into this taster session to find out more about how this course could enhance your science teaching career pathway to teach physics as an additional specialism.
How can children’s misconceptions be identified and addressed to secure scientific understanding?
This session explores how formative assessment approaches can be used not just to identify misconceptions, but to inform responsive teaching and curriculum planning. Drawing on their own extensive experience in the classroom and from working with hundreds of teachers in primary schools, the presenters will share practical strategies, diagnostic tools and planning approaches that help teachers discover and tackle common misunderstandings in science. Participants will leave with materials for adapting sequences of learning, examples of pupil thinking and tested classroom-ready resources that make a difference to developing more accurate scientific thinking.
This session is aimed at classroom teachers and science leaders, and aims to:
• Share evidence from research, including issues common misconceptions that children hold. • Discuss evidence-informed resources and practical strategies that teachers can use to understand and address common misconceptions that children hold in science. Examples will be used from schools that have trialled these materials and approaches and reflected on their effectiveness • Give participants opportunity to try out and discuss some of the resources to identify their own misconceptions • Encourage participants to reflect on which strategies might be most useful to address the needs of the children in their schools, and begin to plan how to audit, implement and review actions to adapt teaching and planning.
Primary Science Education Consultant, Dr Jo Science Solutions
RSC Excellence in Primary Education Prize 2024. With both a teaching and science background, Dr. Jo Montgomery has more than 20 years’ experience working with children and schools to support science education from Early Years to university. Passionate about encouraging curiosity... Read More →
PSQM Development Lead, Primary Science Quality Mark
PSQM Professional Learning Partner. Primary Science Teaching Trust Fellow. Member of the PSQM Expert Advisory Group. Member of the ASE Teacher Developers’ Committee. Accredited trainer of the Primary Science Capital Teaching Approach. Co-author of the PSTT resources See Through Sci... Read More →
The aim of this session is to invite science teachers practising ESD to honestly examine their inner relationship to change-making, and discover what the IDG framework offers in response. Also to equip participants with practical, IDG-grounded techniques to help pupils experience sustainability as a way of living, not merely a body of knowledge.
"ESD is more than knowledge and skills — it is a way of living." If this is true: Are we living it? And what might quietly prevent us?
This workshop holds space for both. You'll be invited to notice — honestly and without judgement — how your own sustainability work feels from the inside: the urgency, the satisfaction, the fatigue, and perhaps the subtle resistance when genuine progress appears. You'll encounter the identity trap: the deeply human tendency to become so invested in change-making as a source of meaning that we unknowingly slow our own progress.
Far from a counsel of despair, this is an opening. The IDG framework offers a practical map of the inner capacities that ESD actually demands — and techniques for cultivating them, in yourself and in your pupils.
You'll leave knowing which IDG dimensions your teaching currently develops and which remain untouched — and with a few concrete techniques to help yourself and your pupils experience sustainability as lived reality rather than distant abstraction.
Participants should be able to: > Recognise the identity trap in their own ESD practice and approach it with curiosity rather than resistance > Identify which IDG dimensions their current teaching cultivates and which remain underdevelope > Apply at least one embodied, IDG-grounded technique to help pupils experience sustainability as a way of living
Background: A 2010 School Science Review article observed that ESD requires "tenacity and a specific way of working — it is a way of living." Yet years working across sustainability groups revealed a paradox for me: the more committed the change-maker, the more likely they were to have lost felt, embodied connection to what a sustainable future actually looks like to inhabit. Busy change-making had quietly replaced the lived experience of the change itself. A second, more confronting pattern emerged: we often unknowingly derive identity, purpose, and meaning from the change-making process. When genuine solutions surface, they are subtly resisted — completing the work would require reinventing ourselves. Kegan and Lahey (2009) name this the immunity to change: competing commitments operating largely beneath awareness.
The Inner Development Goals framework (IDG Foundation, 2021), co-created with over 1,000 researchers and practitioners, maps 23 inner skills across five dimensions — Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting — as the missing complement to the SDGs, and offers a rigorous developmental path for the inner work ESD actually demands.
Failure and experimentation are fundamental parts of STEM, but in practice SEND students can find the 'trial and error' of STEM incredibly challenging. By creating scaffolded, flexible lesson plans and building our own STEM confidence, we can deliver more accessible and inclusive lessons for our students in environments where they truly feel safe. In this interactive workshop the Lightyear Foundation and members of their youth advisory panel will share their lived experiences, explore best practice and facilitate a space for teachers to grow their skills and confidence in inclusive STEM.
Outcomes: - Participants will understand some of the barriers facing disabled and neurodivergent students in STEM, and how they can be reduced or removed. - Participants will be feel more confident delivering accessible and inclusive STEM lessons. - Participants will feel empowered to reach out to each other & the SEND in STEM Network for support.
Background: As a disabled-led organisation specialising in accessible and inclusive STEM, we regularly work with teachers who struggle delivering STEM lessons with their SEND students. One of the main barriers they face is the emotional dysregulation which can follow an "unsuccessful" science experiment, or a tricky maths problem. Teachers tell us that "SEND students aren't allowed to fail", and when this combines with their own low subject confidence, teachers can end up feeling anxious and unsure about their STEM lessons. Our experience delivering accessible and inclusive STEM, combined with the expertise of our youth advisory panel, has shown us that embracing failure as a fundamental part of STEM is just one of the practical steps that can lead to 'safe-to-fail' classroom environments, and grow student and teacher confidence.
In this session attendees will be introduced to Model-Evidence-Link (MEL) instructional materials designed to assist American learners as they construct arguments to evaluate the plausibility of evidence connected to models and the research base that supports using these scaffolds. These MEL diagrams allow students to think critically about socio-scientific issues by evaluating connections between lines of evidence and alternative explanatory claims.
Explorations that utilize the MEL scaffold promote changes in epistemic judgments, including claim plausibility, and help students move toward a more civically minded and scientific stance. Student discourse is a critical part of these activities and include negotiation toward scientific consensus.
MEL activities for available for teaching about socio-scientific issues include climate change, dead zones, energy, extreme weather, fracking, freshwater resources, fossils, moon formation, nuclear energy, origins of the universe, soil and food security and wetlands. All materials are freely available under a Creative Commons license. Participants receive access to all instructional materials and instructional guides, found here:
AI technology is changing the fabric of scientific knowledge building. In biology, for example, AlphaFold predicts the structure of proteins and other biomolecules, changing how drugs are developed and diseases are studied. In medicine, AI-powered image generation is changing medical diagnostics. In chemistry, AI tools are automating and accelerating organic chemistry and material discovery. In physics, complex AI-based simulations accelerate research across topics, while AI-based robotics is driving change in engineering. Further, scientific inquiry requires new skills for scientists, such as designing ‘AI experiments’, navigating data ethics and governance, evaluating AI models, and interpreting AI system output.
How, then, is school science changing to teach about this new way of scientific working and these new discoveries? What new AI-related real-world science concepts and skills might be taught?
The aim of this workshop is to start this discussion. We will lead a workshop to brainstorm candidate uses of AI in real-world science and consider what concepts and skills might be introduced at different stages of science education. We will provide examples of how basic AI literacy concepts have been introduced in existing AI lessons covering topics such as ecosystems and healthcare. We will use these to spark discussion on what content might be taught in classroom science lessons to showcase `AI in real-world science’. We are particularly interested in stimulating discussion on how scientific inquiry in school might change in the light of AI technology.
The outcome from this workshop will be that participants will become more familiar with AI literacy concepts and begin to form ideas about what AI literacy for Science might look like. They will also start to develop ideas for lessons that introduce `AI in real-world science’ into their science classrooms. We do not have the answers to what should be taught and how about `AI in real-world science’, but as computer science education researchers, we would like to facilitate this discussion with science educators to help work towards this goal.
Climate change education is becoming increasingly important within secondary science education. However, biodiversity, ecosystems, and climate change are often taught separately, limiting opportunities for students to develop connected understanding of environmental issues and sustainability challenges.
This session introduces an integrated curriculum framework developed to support the teaching of climate change through biodiversity and ecosystems in Malaysian secondary schools. The curriculum was developed as part of a PhD project using a design-based research approach informed by curriculum analysis, teacher perspectives, and iterative refinement.
The session aims to support secondary science teachers and curriculum developers in exploring practical approaches for integrating climate change concepts within existing science and geography topics. Participants will be introduced to the structure of the curriculum framework, including integrated learning objectives, inquiry-based learning approaches, differentiated learning strategies, and examples of classroom activities.
Examples from selected lesson plans and teaching materials will be shared to demonstrate how biodiversity and ecosystems can be connected meaningfully to climate change using local environmental contexts and real-world environmental issues. The session will also discuss practical considerations identified during teacher piloting and curriculum refinement, including curriculum alignment, classroom feasibility, and interdisciplinary integration.
Participants will have opportunities for brief reflection and discussion on how similar approaches could be adapted within their own educational contexts.
Participants will:
- identify practical approaches for integrating biodiversity and climate change concepts within secondary science education - explore curriculum integration strategies and lesson design approaches - reflect on teacher-informed approaches to climate change education - consider how curriculum materials could be adapted for their own contexts
Join us for a thought provoking and hands-on session where we’ll provide stimulus to consider your curriculum enrichment provision, barriers and solutions to equity of opportunity for all We’ll share reflective tools, identify local and national enrichment opportunities and resources to make the connection between core curriculum content and nurturing curiosity of your learners. This session is built on exploration beyond the core curriculum but with scientific rigour intact.
Outcomes: • Reflect on your own context and enrichment offer • Made connections between core curriculum and enrichment opportunities for all • Considered ways to build on your current enrichment activities in school • Take away ideas and resources for use immediately including a gap analysis tool and a curriculum map
Background: Our experience of listening and working with teachers tells us that curriculum pressures continue to be relentless and time for teaching science in the core curriculum is already under pressure in many primary classrooms. We know teachers plan and deliver great core lessons, they inspire their learners to be curious about the world around them but do they ever really get the chance to nurture that curiosity?
Research tells us that enrichment opportunities are vital for providing space for learners to explore their interests in a less structured environment.
With so many years of experience running clubs, My Science Club was founded on the basis of creating a space for children’s curiosity to be fostered and grow whilst supporting the educator at the same time. This remains our passion and with a new curriculum in England and Scotland on the horizon, we have a moment to consider what we currently have whilst building for the future. In that moment sit our children in schools right now – they can’t wait for us to tread water getting to grips with new curricula, they need equity of opportunity right now before they leave primary or lose that curiosity and interest.
Our experience and knowledge as nationally accredited trainers of the Primary Science Capital Teaching Approach (PSCTA) has fuelled our passion for equity of access to enrichment activities and not just for the privileged few.
Primary Science Professional Development Leader, Primary Science Geeks
I have been delivering high quality professional development for leaders, classroom practitioners, trainees and ECTs for over 20 years. I am a Chartered Science Teacher (CSciTeach) and have been involved with ASE for many years, most recently as curriculum drafter for the new National... Read More →
This session will present the design, implementation, and findings of a three year research and improvement project focused on raising the quality of science teaching and learning in high deprivation settings.
We worked with 32 primary schools to explore what improves science teaching — and what holds it back. You’ll hear how schools used science audits, teacher surveys, targeted CPD, and network meetings to build teacher confidence and strengthen classroom practice. We’ll share what changed, what teachers valued most, and how high-quality CPD helped schools understand their challenges and make improvements.
We’ll also discuss the real world barriers schools face — including high subject leader turnover — and what helped them keep making progress.
Participants will gain: • Evidence of impact, including clear improvements in teacher confidence, positive shifts in science teaching practice and excellent participant feedback on CPD quality • Insights into systemic challenges, particularly: - High turnover of science subject leaders and its effect on continuity - Practical strategies for supporting science subject leaders in high deprivation contexts - An approach for using deprivation related data to understand school needs and tailor support - Recommendations for sustaining improvement, even in schools with leadership instability
Background: Primary science teaching provision gaps in England remain strongly linked to socioeconomic deprivation. Schools serving communities with high levels of disadvantage often face additional barriers: limited departmental stability, fewer opportunities for sustained professional development and sometimes significant behavioural challenges.
This project worked with 32 schools across three ‘priority’ areas in the south-east of England (Edmonton, Medway and the North Thames Estuary) to understand their specific needs and to trial targeted support. The initiative combined school level diagnostic audits, teacher surveys, structured CPD, mentoring and ongoing collaboration through network meetings. The aim was to build capacity, strengthen subject leadership, and improve the quality of science teaching in a way that is responsive to each school’s context.
CPD and support was delivered across schools by Kulvinder Johal, Primary Science Mentor for the Primary Science Teaching Trust. Content was created by drawing on years of experience working in the classroom, backed up by research and findings on good primary science teaching in the sector.
The Office for National Statistics published estimates of green jobs in July 2025. 61% of these were STEM-based, especially in engineering and tech and only 3% were nature-based. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated up to 725,000 new roles could be created in low-carbon sectors like renewable energy generation and electric vehicle manufacture.
EngineeringUK has developed a set of curriculum resources, the Climate Schools Programme, in several Key Stage 3 subjects and a simple model for how to use the subject of environmental sustainability to engage students in thinking about engineering and tech careers.
The resources and model are based on solutions to environmental problems, rather than the problems themselves, and naturally extends to the current and future careers associated with those solutions. Attendees will have a chance to explore how they might put these ideas into practice in their setting.
Why do shadows change throughout the day? What causes the seasons? How can observations of the sky help students develop mathematical understanding?
This interactive session uses astronomy and Earth-space science phenomena as a context for mathematical inquiry and STEM sensemaking. Participants will engage in practical demonstrations and hands-on activities related to shadows, seasonal change, Earth’s motion, scale, geometry, and observation. Through simple classroom-friendly models and collaborative investigations, the session will highlight how mathematics can serve as a powerful tool for interpreting and explaining scientific phenomena.
The session will emphasize inquiry-based and cross-curricular approaches that encourage curiosity, observation, prediction, reasoning, and discussion. Activities are designed to be adaptable for upper primary, early secondary, and teacher education settings and will include ideas for both indoor and outdoor learning experiences.
Participants will leave with practical strategies, lesson ideas, and resources that support interdisciplinary STEM teaching while helping students see mathematics as meaningful, relevant, and connected to the world around them.
As a result of attending this session, participants will be able to: • use simple models and demonstrations to explain shadows, seasons, and Earth’s motion • facilitate interdisciplinary STEM activities that integrate science inquiry and mathematical reasoning • adapt astronomy-based investigations for classroom and outdoor learning contexts • support student observation, prediction, and sensemaking through hands-on learning experiences • identify opportunities for cross-curricular connections between mathematics and science
Background: This session draws upon interdisciplinary STEM teaching experiences developed through teacher education, classroom practice, and collaborative work focused on inquiry-based mathematics and science instruction. Our work explores how astronomy and Earth-space science phenomena can provide accessible and engaging contexts for helping students connect mathematical reasoning with scientific observation and real-world experiences.
The approach has been shaped through collaboration with STEM educators and ongoing work in teacher preparation focused on experiential learning, mathematical sensemaking, and cross-curricular STEM integration. Attention has been given to helping learners visualize abstract concepts through movement, modelling, measurement, and observation.
This workshop will bring together two urgent agendas in science education: helping students make sense of climate and media-based claims, and ensuring they can see clear, meaningful progression into green and vocational futures. It will explore how science curriculum and qualification design can better connect scientific knowledge, evidence evaluation, real-world relevance and future pathways.
Participants will explore how science education can connect disciplinary knowledge with climate literacy, media literacy and green skills; consider how qualification design can make science more relevant and future-facing; and think about how curriculum, assessment and pathways can work together to support informed, motivated and aspirational learners.
Participants will leave with practical ideas for linking science teaching to climate and media literacy, a clearer understanding of how green skills and progression routes can be surfaced within KS4 science, and a stronger framework for thinking about relevance, engagement and future-facing qualification design.
