“Ofqual sounds the death knell for UK science education” declared the Physiological Society last year when Ofqual, the Office of Qualifications and Exam Regulations, proposed changes to the way practical work in science GCSEs and A-levels will be assessed. The Wellcome Trust was also “deeply concerned”, stating that the proposals jeopardised “the progression of the next generation of scientists”. Individual scientists joined in, tweeting things like “UK government to remove practical experiments from science exams. What a totally, unequivocally shit idea”.

By January of this year, the “scientific community” had succeeded in convincing the education secretary Nicky Morgan to parrot their arguments, so that she also said that she was “concerned that a decision to remove practical assessment from science qualifications is in danger of holding back the next generation of scientists”.

The Nobel prize-winning president of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, joined in with the Ofqual-bashing next, in a letter to The Guardian saying that “Ofqual must…reverse changes before real damage is done to science in the UK”. In the same letter, Nurse writes “Finding things out for yourself is at the very heart of science”. As a science teacher, it is statements like this that lead me worry that Nurse, and others like him in the “science community”, have at best a superficial, and at worst a grossly inaccurate, idea about science education.

Students very rarely “find things out” for themselves in their school science lessons. Practical work is not some magical process whereby scientific knowledge is painlessly implanted into the minds of young people as they stir spatulas of sugar into hot water, or hang weights from a spring.

It sometimes seems that everyone who’s ever set foot in a school reckons they are an expert in how I ought to do my job. But I’d expect better from scientists who are supposed to rely on evidence and data. My impression is that many of the scientists who are enraged by the changes to GCSE and A-level sciences make their pronouncements based on nothing more than their own rose-tinted recollections of school science. And it appears that many of them have a fetish for practical work. When Robert Winston says “the more you do practically, the more you embed knowledge”, he may be correct in some vague, general way, but he is ignoring research that has concluded practical work in school science lessons may be largely ineffective.

Practical work should undeniably have a role in science education, but many scientists seem to think it is the be all and end all of school science. They are wrong. It is the models and theories of science which are important, and these do not automatically manifest themselves through practical work.

Anyone with a genuine appreciation for the complexities and realities of how practical work is carried out in schools will know that practical work rarely achieves even a fraction of the things we, as teachers of science, would like it to. One reason for this is that teachers are under huge pressure to carry out practical lessons for the sole purpose of ensuring students meet the assessment criteria, thus ending up using practical lessons to teach students how to jump through hoops more than anything else. This is why Ofqual are making the proposed changes.

I have been disheartened by the way the “science community” seem to be ignoring the fact that prominent science educators and ordinary teachers have welcomed Ofqual’s proposed changes. Many in the science community seem to have little understanding of the realities of school science lessons, and of how broken and corrupt the current situation is. As one physics teacher put it recently, “The removal of coursework from A-level science is only “a death knell for UK science” if “UK science” depends on your ability to plagiarise”.

60 per cent of responses to Ofqual’s consultation on this matter agreed that the proposals “present the best balance to achieve the delivery of the curriculum aims, encourage a wide range of practical science teaching”. Ofqual has the support of many school science teachers, yet the director for the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) thinks it’s “really disappointing that Ofqual have not listened to the science and engineering community”. Well, as a science teacher, I think it’s really disappointing that the science community make me feel like I’m not worth listening to.

Now that Ofqual is pressing forward with its changes, I hope that those who are concerned about the changes will maintain their interest in science education and use their considerable influence and resources to support teachers in getting the most out of practical work in their lessons. They can do this by engaging with teachers and schools directly and by producing high quality resources to help science teachers integrate good, pedagogically sound, practical work into their lessons.

Alom Shaha (@alomshaha) teaches at a comprehensive school in London and is the author of The Young Atheist’s Handbook.