One of my hobbyhorses is that scientific discoveries, no matter how profound, might as well not be made unless they can be communicated effectively to journal editors and the public. When I go out on the stump as an editor, in seminars or lab visits, I always emphasize how difficult it is for papers to grab an editor’s attention, given the ever-increasing barrage of papers we see and review (last year I handled nearly 800 new manuscripts – three years ago it was more like 500). Any fool can be taught to use a machine that goes ‘ping’ – but accessibility is just as important, and as the world becomes more competitive, literacy is an increasingly vital skill for any scientist.

The main thing, I think, is to grab ‘em while they’re young. This is why I was inspired by a trip I made yesterday to a school in Walthamstow, in North-East London, to judge science debates staged by Year-9 and 10 secondary-school pupils (that is, around 14 years old) in the Borough of Waltham Forest. Inspired? Sure. There is hope for us yet.

It all started with a personal contact, a schoolteacher whom I met in our synagogue community when the Gees still resided in Barkingside, which is north of Da Happenin’ ‘Hood of Ilford, Innit, and sarf of the Footballer’s Wives’ country of Chigwell. A few years ago she was Leading Edge Manager in charge of developing curriculum enrichment activities at Valentine’s School in Ilford, which is a science ‘beacon school’. Impressed by my mantra (and my book The Science of Middle-earth) she conceived a special day in which her year-9’s would get an inspirational day of science and fantasy. I went down to talk about the science of the Lord of the Rings (movie mania was at its height then) and my friend Jack Cohen (co-author with Ian Stewart and Terry Pratchett of the Science of Discworld) gave one of his entertaining lectures about alien life.

Jack Cohen – schoolchildren are impressed by the fact that he looks exactly as they imagine mad professors to look like

Then we supervised and judged some practical experiments based on problems set out in The Science of Middle-earth – how do you judge Elvish visual acuity – and can balrogs really fly?

That was then.

A few years on, my friend has risen in the educational hierarchy and is now Secondary National Strategy Consultant for English for the whole of the Borough of Waltham Forest. The challenges are great. Waltham Forest is vigorously multi-ethnic, has all the usual problems of the inner city, and aspirations are generally low. One of her general aims is to promote a shift in culture to what she calls ‘speaking and listening’ – in other words, to foster traditions of argument and debate. English departments have taken readily to this, but science and maths departments have lagged behind. With my mantra still in mind, my colleague has been trying to address that need. One might argue that speaking and listening are at least as essential to science as they are to English – after all, traditional norms of discourse are still very much the means by which science is promoted.

To that end she and colleagues initiated a day of science debate, in which debating teams from perhaps a dozen schools in the borough came to the shiny new Walthamstow Academy to tackle the motion ‘Climate Change is the Biggest Con of the Twenty-First Century’. My task was to be one of the debate judges. I was joined by Damian Carrington, Environment Editor of The Guardian; my English Strategist colleague, and another schoolteacher.

The debates began – and what surprised me, as perhaps it shouldn’t have, was the degree to which these young teenagers had really grasped the issues, and how well they presented them, with articulation and passion. They had, for the most part, done their homework – on how formal debates are conducted, on good presentation, and on the scientific issues. Once or twice I even heard the word ‘anthropogenic’. Sure, the results were variable, but we judges had quite a task picking an overall winner. I came away with four messages -

- first, that science really is about effective presentation as much as experimentation, and that this should be taught as early as possible. Damian and I recalled that the first time we had to stand up and give a lecture was when we were graduate students, and we wished we’d had the chance to be trained in such skills much earlier;

- second, that there is a place for the old-fashioned disciplines of oratory and rhetoric to be taught formally at schools. These are not elitist subjects from an earlier age of privilige, but essential skills for anyone to learn who means to get on in the world, whether or not they choose to become scientists. It is perhaps significant that the winning school was the only one that already has a school debating team;

- third, that teenagers from Da Inna City Innit are very far from the incoherent thugs portrayed in the newspapers. To be sure, such thugs exist, but news reports concentrate on a minority such that we assume that menacing hoodies are the norm. By the same token, the teens taking part in yesterday’s debates were the pick of the intellectual crop. Yet there is hope. Lots of hope. If only we could find the best way to encourage it, and not stifle it. Yesterday’s exercise looks like a contender, and I’m certainly up for judging if they do it again;

- fourth; I was quite enthused by the teenagers themselves – their naive excitement, their youth, their freshness, their willingness to try out new things, their energy. It was quite infectious. Schools, even in Da Inna City, can be exciting and inspirational places. It was almost enough for me to dust off my contingency plan of becoming a secondary-school science teacher (though not quite).

But do such initiatives actually work? My colleague told me something that she’d not told me before. That after Jack and I had been parachuted in to talk about aliens and fantasy, all those years ago at Valentine’s, her once sullen and truculent Year 9’s had conceived a new passion for science, and end-of-year results reflected that in a marked improvement in the quality of work. So we’re not just shouting into a gale, here. It is possible to enthuse teenagers about science, and now we know how.