A group of six Brooke Weston Year 11 girls have been chosen to take part in a trial scholarship from The STEM Skills Fund (SSF) for A Level physics and maths, with the aim to help increase the number of girls that continue to study these subjects beyond GCSE.
There were just 7,645 females among 35,344 entrants for the A Level physics exam in 2016 and girls made up less than a third of the students who entered for further maths A Level. These figures have a significant impact on the gender balance in occupations in science, technology, engineering, maths (STEM) and finance and the trial hopes to change this.
The scholarship will see students receive a payment at the start of the year and if they opt to take physics or maths at A Level they receive further weekly payments for 16 weeks.
Science teacher Mr Dan Hawksley said, ‘We have always had female teachers and positive female role models at Brooke Weston and we have higher than average numbers of girls taking these subjects at A Level however, we would like to see these numbers increase further and this programme will hopefully open the girls eyes to new possibilities that they might not have considered before.’