The number of pupils taking physics has fallen by almost 40 per cent in the past 20 years. To make matters worse, almost half of the country’s physics teachers will be retiring in the next decade.

As a result the Institute of Physics is preparing to offer 300 bursaries to prospective students of the subject.

The findings, from the University of Buckingham, have alarmed academics and scientists. “The science community is in danger of sleep-walking into the loss of one of the greatest branches of knowledge that we possess,” Alan Smithers, one of the report’s authors, said.

“The challenge is to secure physics for the future and educate everyone in science as a whole.”

Professor Smithers says that the dramatic decline in physics is directly linked to the introduction of the national curriculum in 1988. Since then pupils at state schools have had to study all three sciences at GCSE or take the combined science exam, which imparts only a little of chemistry, biology and physics.

In independent schools, where pupils do not have to follow the national curriculum, they may choose to study only one science.

While 60 per cent of biology students are women, they comprise only 20 per cent of physics students. However, with more women than men attracted to teaching, science teachers are frequently not experts in physics. As a result they have less enthusiasm for the subject.

The study also shows that a teacher’s expertise in a subject is the second most powerful predictor of pupil achievement in GCSE and A level physics, after pupil ability.

“Independent schools have the freedom to offer any combination of sciences and that should be extended to maintained schools,” Professor Smithers said. “But many physics graduates don’t want to teach biology.” The result is that the number of pupils taking physics A level has fallen from 46,606 in 1985 to 28,698 last year.

Professor Smithers also says that better-qualified teachers are attracted to working in independent schools. That claim has been borne out in his latest research, with the disclosure that nearly a quarter (23.5 per cent) of 11 to 16-year-olds have no teacher who has studied physics at university, while two thirds of physics teachers at independent schools have a joint honours in the subject.

He concludes that “pupils from low-income homes tend to be concentrated in those schools least likely to offer GCSE physics and with the least well-qualified teachers”. Robert Kirby-Harris, the chief executive of the Institute of Physics, blames part of the decline on league tables, and the tendency for some schools to pick only the brightest to study physics, in the fear that others may fail.

“Physics is seen as a hard subject so average students are often dissuaded from taking it. I really think the dysfunctional element of league tables is a factor in putting young people off studying physics,” he said.

Between 1994 and 2004, more than 30 per cent of the physics departments in Britain disappeared. Last year Newcastle became the first member of the elite Russell Group of universities to announce that it would no longer accept applications to study undergraduate physics.

In order to boost the number from lower income backgrounds, the Institute of Physics is offering 300 bursaries of £1,000 each next year to budding physicists.

Isaac Newton 1642-1727 Discovered the universal law of gravitation, three laws of motion and that white light is made up of many colours

Michael Faraday 1791-1867 Discovered the induction of the first electric currents and made the first dynamo. He had no formal education

James Clerk Maxwell 1831-79 His theories contributed to the understanding of electromagnetic waves, which prepared the way for wireless telegraphy and telephony

Joseph John Thomson 1856-1940 Discovered the electron. Is buried near Newton in the nave of Westminster Abbey

Ernest Rutherford 1871-1937 New Zealand-born, pioneer of modern atomic science. His main research was in radioactivity, and the discovery of alpha, beta and gamma rays

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