Client
Institute of Physics
The professional body and learned society for physics in the UK and Ireland.
About the work
The Institute of Physics is the professional body and learned society for physics in the UK and Ireland, and a registered charity. It supports physicists in research, industry and education, accredits university degrees and works with government on science policy. A big part of its work is about who gets to do physics in the first place, especially closing the gender gap.
Always Possible has worked with the Institute of Physics on two projects tackling that gap from different angles.
In 2019, the Institute of Physics and King’s College London commissioned us to evaluate the London pilot of Gender Action, funded by the Mayor of London. Gender Action is a schools award programme they co-founded with the UCL Institute of Education and the University Council of Modern Languages. It helps nurseries, schools and colleges challenge the stereotypes that steer young people away from subjects like physics. We built the evaluation framework, gathered feedback from more than 1,500 teachers, pupils and parents, analysed schools’ action plans and tracked engagement across 305 schools. Our findings showed where schools were changing their practice, from careers guidance to classroom activity, and helped take Gender Action from a London pilot to a national programme.
In 2022, the Institute of Physics brought us back to look at the I Am A Physicist badge, which girls in Girlguiding units earn through hands-on experiments. The badge was developed by volunteers in the Institute’s Midlands branch, and demand was growing fast across the UK. But it relied on time-limited funding, and there was no clear way yet to show the difference it made. We ran a workshop with the physicists from universities and industry who’d built and delivered the badge, exploring what it achieves and how its impact could be measured. We then set out recommendations and a phased roadmap, covering how to evidence its reach, make the case to funders, equip unit leaders to capture impact and move towards a self-financing model. The Institute’s Physics Insight team used our next steps to shape its analysis of the badge data.
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