British Science Week, the annual ten-day celebration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, has opened registrations for its 2026 edition, and the response from the education sector has been nothing short of extraordinary. More than 12,000 schools across the United Kingdom have signed up to participate, a 30 per cent increase on last year and the highest number since the event was established in its current format in 2015.
The programme, coordinated by the British Science Association with funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and a consortium of corporate sponsors, provides schools with free activity packs, lesson plans, experiment guides and access to a network of volunteer scientists, engineers and researchers who visit classrooms to demonstrate their work and answer questions. The packs are tailored to different age groups, from early years through to sixth form, and are designed to complement the national curriculum while encouraging the kind of open-ended, inquiry-based learning that formal timetabling often struggles to accommodate.
This year’s theme, “Science in Our Streets,” invites students to explore the science embedded in their immediate environments: the physics of a roundabout, the chemistry of a bakery, the biology of a garden pond, the mathematics of a bus timetable. The theme was chosen deliberately to counter the perception, prevalent among some young people, that science is an abstract, laboratory-bound pursuit disconnected from the texture of everyday life.
The British Science Association’s chief executive noted that the record uptake reflected both a genuine enthusiasm among teachers and a growing recognition of the importance of scientific literacy in a world shaped by climate change, artificial intelligence and public health challenges. “Teachers tell us that their students are hungry for this kind of learning,” the chief executive said. “They want to understand how things work. They want to ask questions and test answers. They want to feel that science is something they can do, not just something they are told about.”
The corporate sponsorship model has been instrumental in scaling the programme. Major pharmaceutical, engineering and technology firms have contributed funding, materials and, crucially, the time of their employees, who volunteer as classroom ambassadors. A leading aerospace company, for example, is sending teams of engineers to schools in the West Country and the North East to run workshops on aerodynamics and materials science. A major supermarket chain is funding food science activities in primary schools, teaching children about nutrition, preservation and the chemistry of cooking.
