26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Rebuilding the Australian Physics Pipeline: Enrolment Decline, Teacher Capacity, and Curriculum Relevance

Not scheduled

20m

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Contributed Oral AIP | Physics Education (PEG)

Speaker

Benjamin Kelley

Description

Australian physics education faces a pipeline crisis. Declining senior physics enrolments reduce the pool of students entering physics-intensive university courses, while shortages of physics-trained teachers weaken the conditions needed to attract, retain, and develop future physics students. In many schools, physics is sustained by small classes, isolated teachers, heavy workloads, limited professional learning, and, in some cases, teachers working outside their disciplinary preparation. The result is not simply a participation problem, but a system capacity problem.

This paper argues that rebuilding the physics pipeline requires attention to both student demand and teacher capability. Efforts to increase participation will remain fragile if schools cannot provide confident, engaging, well-supported, discipline-rich physics teaching. Similarly, curriculum renewal will have limited effect if teachers lack time, resources, professional communities, and ongoing disciplinary development. Teacher retention and professional identity should therefore be treated as central to the future of physics education, not as secondary implementation issues.

Curriculum relevance remains an important lever within this broader pipeline strategy. Senior physics should connect foundational ideas to modern applications such as imaging, semiconductors, quantum effects, climate systems, robotics, energy technologies, and space systems. Students should encounter physics as a living discipline for modelling, evidence, approximation, and cross-domain reasoning, not as a museum of nineteenth-century experiments or merely a prerequisite filter for later study.

The paper proposes a pipeline framework linking enrolment, teacher supply, professional learning, workload, curriculum relevance, and physics identity. It argues that rebuilding Australian physics requires coordinated action across schools, universities, professional bodies, and education systems.