Introduction

The UK is experiencing a relative Golden Age for planetaria, thanks in many ways to its national curriculum. In 1991 the British government finally bowed to many years of steady pressure by interest groups and introduced into a new and controversial general curriculum a requirement for pupils to attain knowledge about the Earth-Moon system, solar system objects and basic cosmology. Prior to this there had been no science curriculum for pupils aged under 11. Astronomy formed a small part of nature study. The science education of 11–16 year-olds depended on their GCSE syllabuses.

The purpose of this paper is to study what knowledge of the cosmos pupils are now required to attain, how the content changed when a revised curriculum was introduced in 1994, and how planetaria go about teaching the subject to schoolchildren. We will also look at how the curriculum differs in Scotland, and what ‘A’ level students have to learn about astronomy.

Background

From the late 1950s, when one of the first planetaria in Britain was built at Marylebone Road, London, up to 1991, some teachers had organised their school visits to these star theatres as an extra-curricula activity (except for those students studying astronomy at O-level) which required little or no preparation or class work afterwards. Generally speaking, however, most school parties turned up because they wanted to have a valuable learning experience about the Earth's place in the universe. Then, seemingly overnight, the government expected teachers to have detailed knowledge of the reasons for the seasons, tides, the Moon's phases, planetary motions, the Milky Way and many other difficult astronomical concepts.