According to Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), girls surpass boys for the first time in A-level science entries this 2019.
The entries reached fifty and three-tenths percent (50.3%) in science fields such as biology, physics, and chemistry. It was hailed by scientists as “a cause for celebration” since female students started to take the initiative to lead.
Not only that, all A-levels appeared to increase overall from the previous year which has nineteen and two-tenths percent (19.2%) to today’s twenty and nine-tenths percent (20.9%).
However, the results also revealed that across all A-level entries who got an A grade or higher, have dipped to its lowest level since 2007. There was a one (1) point reduction in chemistry while physics and biology have one and seven-tenths (1.7) and one and eighty-eight hundredths (1.88) respectively.
More girls engage in science subjects
The increased number of girls who take science subjects is by no means an accident. Since 2010, major reforms have been reported to encourage girls to delve into science and math-related subjects.
The chief executive of the United Kingdom exam board OCR (Oxford, Cambridge, and RSA), Jill Duffy, told it was crucial to support girls in pursuing science to give “positive role models”:
One of the things that we looked at in our specs for A-level is very much looking at giving some positive role models in terms of science as well.
JCQ reported that science isn’t only the subject that girls were taking the wheel on. Commonly, computing is dominantly being studied by boys but girls entries showed significant changes when the figure rose by twenty-one and four-tenths percent (21.4%).
A report from The Guardian, showed results that girls performed better than boys in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) courses.
An estimate of over one in four exam entries of age sixteen (16) girls has top final grades. The figure displayed an astonishing comparison from eighteen and six-tenths percent (18.6%) in boys entries to twenty-five and three-tenths percent (25.3%) in girls entries of this year’s summer exams.
Regardless of the sweeping shift, the culmination of years of the undertaking wasn’t in vain.
As the senior responsible officer at Pearson, Derek Richardson, have said that “young people are increasingly concerned about the world around them and want to make a difference” which pushes them to pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) as their choice of career field in higher education.
