ABSTRACT
The concern for science, and the focus upon school science in particular, was not confined to Britain, but was common to all the nations of Europe. At an international level UNESCO and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation were concerned with the broader problems of science education. University science departments had offered occasional courses for teachers since the First World War, and these began to take on a more regular pattern in the late 1950s. From the inception of the Association of Public School Science Masters, many science teachers had worked indefatigably to promote their cause of 'more science, better taught', first, by bringing pressures to bear upon their fellow members and, second, by collaborating with more widely prestigious scientific pressure groups and individuals to improve the status of science in education, especially in those educational organizations with which they were immediately and professionally concerned, secondary schools and universities.
