A Day of Discovery at the Great Science Share for Schools
At St Mary’s University in Twickenham, the future of British science arrived in small shoes, with big questions and an appetite for the extraordinary.
The corridors of St Mary’s University hum with a particular kind of electricity on a morning like this — not the kind you can measure, but the kind you feel.
There is something quietly radical about watching a ten-year-old explain the principles of air resistance to a room full of adults. Not haltingly, not nervously, but with the bright-eyed authority of someone who has genuinely discovered something and cannot wait a single moment longer to tell you about it. This is the Great Science Share for Schools, and on a Monday morning in May, St Mary’s University in Twickenham became its cathedral.
The event brought together primary school children from across the region for a day of hands-on science, live demonstrations, and genuinely joyful discovery. It was the product of months of careful preparation by the staff at St Mary’s, whose dedication to making science accessible — and above all, exciting — was evident in every thoughtfully arranged exhibit, every carefully planned demonstration, and every warm word of encouragement offered to a child nervous to share their work. To organise an event of this ambition and scale, one that moves fluidly between the intimate and the spectacular, is no small feat. The staff at St Mary’s deserve enormous credit for pulling it off with such apparent ease, which is, of course, the mark of truly excellent organisation.
Our hosts for the day, Dr Alex Sinclair (Associate Professor in the School of Education) and Emily Montenero (Senior Lecturer in Primary Science) set the tone with a welcome that was both warm and intellectually energising. Their presence throughout the event — engaging with children, supporting student teachers, and ensuring the day ran with its characteristic calm professionalism — was a significant part of what made the experience so memorable.
The rooms of St Mary’s were alive. Tables groaned under the weight of projects: models, experiments, data charts rendered in careful crayon and confident pencil. The children — upper juniors, mostly, with the particular swagger of those who know they are the oldest in the room — took turns delivering science demonstrations that would not have looked out of place in a junior version of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. Their command of their subjects was striking. These were not children reciting facts learned the night before. They were young scientists who had lived inside their questions, turned them over, tested them, and arrived at something they could genuinely call their own.
Elsewhere, primary teaching was on full and glorious display — and here one of the day’s most quietly inspiring stories unfolded. For it was not veteran classroom practitioners leading these sessions, but student teachers: people still in the early chapters of their professional lives, bringing to the work a freshness and enthusiasm that was entirely infectious. To watch a student teacher hold a room of young children in the palm of their hand, guiding them through discovery with patience, warmth, and genuine scientific curiosity, is to feel deeply confident about the future of education in this country. These are tomorrow’s teachers, and if Monday was any indication, tomorrow is in very good hands indeed.
Alongside them, student ambassadors moved through the day with quiet purpose and considerable grace — welcoming, directing, supporting, and encouraging at every turn. Their investment in the event was unmistakable. They were not merely volunteers filling a rota; they were advocates — for science, for education, and for the idea that a university ought to throw open its doors and truly mean it. St Mary’s should be proud of every one of them.
The children’s engagement was total, their enjoyment entirely unfeigned. Science, on days like this, does not feel like a subject. It feels like a superpower.
The day’s intellectual centrepiece came courtesy of a researcher from the National Physical Laboratory — a name that carries considerable weight in scientific circles, and rightly so. NPL, which has called Teddington home for well over a century, is the keeper of Britain’s measurement standards, the place where the nation’s clocks, scales, and instruments are ultimately calibrated. Its representative brought to St Mary’s a talk that was equal parts mind-bending and humbling: an exploration of how human perception distorts our ability to judge the physical world around us.
Mass, distance, speed — we assume we can read these quantities reliably, with the quiet confidence of creatures who have, after all, been navigating the physical world for several hundred thousand years. We cannot, it turns out. Or rather, we can, but only imperfectly, and in ways that are systematic, predictable, and, once you understand them, rather fascinating. The children listened with the focused intensity of people who sense, correctly, that they are being let in on something important. By the end, several were visibly reconsidering their assumptions. Some of the adults were, too.
Among those in attendance was a small but significant delegation from the Glass Sellers’ Company, whose charitable arm has been a steadfast supporter of the Great Science Share for Schools for many years. Past Master and Chair of the Trustees Leigh Baildham was present, alongside Past Master James Armitage, Prime Warden David Hinton, and Master’s Assistant Jason Stephenson. Their presence was not merely ceremonial. It spoke to a commitment — institutional, personal, enduring — to the idea that supporting science education is not simply a nice thing to do, but a necessary one.
The Glass Sellers’ Charity has been walking alongside the Great Science Share for Schools for long enough to have watched it grow, deepen its reach, and sharpen its ambition. That continuity of support matters enormously. Charities, like children, flourish with consistency and encouragement; the knowledge that funding will be there, that the relationship is genuine and sustained, allows educators and organisers to plan boldly rather than merely survive.
It is worth pausing to consider where money like this actually goes — not in the abstract language of impact reports, but in the specific, human terms of what it makes possible. It goes into the hands of teachers who now have the resources to run experiments that would otherwise be beyond their budgets. It goes into the confidence of a child from a school with no science specialist, who discovers at an event like this that she is brilliant at this, that the questions she has been asking are good ones, that there is a world that wants to hear her answers. It goes quietly and without fanfare into the futures of children in London and across the country who might never otherwise have had cause to think of themselves as scientists.
The Liverymen and Freemen of the Glass Sellers’ Company who donate to the charity may not be present in those classrooms. But their generosity is — in ways both direct and diffuse — and the effect ripples outward in ways that resist easy measurement. Which is, perhaps, fitting given the day’s theme.
As the afternoon wound down and the children began gathering their projects, their lanyards, their goodie bags, and their memories of the day, there was a particular quality to the noise in the room. It was the sound of children who had been taken seriously — by scientists, by teachers, by an institution that invited them in and treated their curiosity as something precious. That sound, it turns out, is indistinguishable from happiness.
The Great Science Share for Schools will return. The children will grow up. Some of them, on the strength of days like this one, will become scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors — people who build and measure and question and discover. Others will simply carry with them, into whatever lives they make, the memory of a morning when they stood up in a university, explained something true about the world, and were applauded for it.
That, when you strip everything else away, is what philanthropy at its best looks like. Not a transaction, but an investment in the irreducible value of a child who has learned to wonder.
But here is the truth that sits beneath all of it: charity only works when the people who can give choose to give. Good intentions do not fund events. Admiration does not pay for resources. It is the decision — conscious, deliberate, generous — of those who have seen something worth supporting and acted on that belief that makes any of this possible. Every child who walked out of St Mary’s on Monday with wider eyes and a fiercer curiosity did so, in some small but very real measure, because somebody gave.
If reading this has moved you — if you recognise the value of what the Glass Sellers’ Charity makes possible and want to be part of what comes next — then the next step could not be simpler. Scan the QR code attached. It will take you moments. For a child somewhere, it could mean everything.
The Glass Sellers’ Charity supports a wide range of educational and scientific initiatives across the United Kingdom. This event is one of many ways in which donations from Liverymen and Freemen of the Company are turned into genuine, lasting change in the lives of young people.
