Triple Science for All by 2028: Delivering the Practicals

25 June 2026By Dr Marisa French

When the Curriculum and Assessment Review published its final report in November 2025, one science recommendation stood out: a statutory entitlement for any student who wants to study the separate sciences, biology, chemistry and physics, as three GCSEs. The government accepted it, committing to support schools to build a Triple Science offer ahead of introducing the entitlement, with a revised national curriculum due in spring 2027 and first teaching from September 2028 (DfE, 2025).

The ambition is right. Access to Triple Science has long been uneven, and the separate sciences open doors to further STEM study and careers. But there is a hard problem underneath the policy. The entitlement promises more students more science at exactly the moment when hands-on practical work, the part of science that makes it science, has been quietly disappearing from classrooms. Schools are being asked to widen access to practical science while the practical base erodes, and no school can build its way out of that gap by 2028.

What Does the Triple Science Entitlement Actually Require?

The Review, led by Professor Becky Francis, framed the entitlement explicitly as a way to remove socio-economic barriers to STEM, because access to the separate sciences has long varied by postcode and by whether a school can afford to staff and resource them. Disadvantaged students remain around half as likely to take the separate sciences as their better-off peers. The government has committed to the entitlement but, as commentators have noted, has not yet set out how it will help schools deliver it (Schools Week, 2025).

The practical implication is significant. For most schools, offering Triple Science to every pupil who wants it means more curriculum time and more laboratory work per cohort, because three GCSEs carry more content and more required practicals than combined science. The entitlement is not only a timetabling question. It is a question of whether a school has the laboratory capacity to put more pupils through more experiments.

Why Is the Entitlement So Hard to Deliver?

Three binding constraints sit in the way, and the Review itself acknowledged them: timetabling pressure, laboratory capacity, and a shortage of specialist teachers, especially in physics. The concern that the plan risks running ahead of the physics teaching workforce was raised immediately on publication (Tes, 2025). The schools least able to offer Triple Science today are typically those serving disadvantaged communities, which often have the fewest labs, the least technician time and the hardest recruitment. An entitlement on paper does not create a free laboratory or a physics specialist.

The Quiet Decline of Hands-On Practical Work

The trend the entitlement runs against is well documented. The Royal Society and EngineeringUK Science Education Tracker found that the proportion of GCSE pupils doing hands-on practical work at least fortnightly fell from 44% in 2016 to 26% in 2023, with video demonstrations increasingly standing in for experiments pupils used to carry out themselves (Royal Society, 2024).

At the same time, 71% of pupils say they want to do more practical science, and for younger pupils the chance to do experiments is among the strongest reasons they give for wanting to continue studying science. The demand is there. The access is not. Expanding an entitlement against a shrinking practical base risks widening the very gap it is meant to close, unless schools can add practical capacity that does not depend on building more rooms and hiring more staff.

Why You Cannot Build Your Way Out by 2028

The obvious response, more laboratories and more specialist teachers, runs into the calendar. Building and equipping new labs is slow and expensive, technician numbers have been falling, and physics teachers are in chronic short supply. With the curriculum due in spring 2027 and first teaching in September 2028, schools have a narrow window, and capital programmes and recruitment pipelines do not move on that timescale. Schools that wait for new labs and new staff will arrive at 2028 unable to honour the entitlement for precisely the pupils it was designed to reach.

How Virtual Labs Add Practical Capacity Without New Rooms

This is where virtual labs change what is possible. WhimsyLabs runs real physics-engine biology, chemistry and physics labs in the browser on the Chromebooks schools already own. Every student can carry out the full range of required practicals without waiting for a free laboratory, a technician to prepare reagents, or a specialist to supervise a hazardous procedure. Several classes can run practicals at the same time, there are no consumables to fund, and there is no setup or clean-up time to absorb.

For a school that cannot offer Triple Science today because it lacks laboratory capacity, that is the difference between honouring the entitlement and turning pupils away. And because the labs run on existing devices, the schools with the least practical infrastructure, often those serving disadvantaged communities, are exactly the ones that gain the most. The entitlement was written to narrow an equity gap, and a delivery route that does not depend on a school's existing lab stock is what makes that aim realistic rather than aspirational.

But Is Virtual Practical Work "Real"?

It is a fair objection, and it deserves a direct answer. The thing currently replacing practical work in many classrooms is the video demonstration, where pupils watch someone else do the experiment. A virtual lab is the opposite of watching. The student performs the procedure, makes the decisions, gets it wrong, and tries again. Our process-based assessment logs every action a pupil takes and grades their technique, so a teacher can see that a student actually carried out the titration or the dissection rather than simply observed one.

Virtual labs are not an argument against hands-on benchwork wherever a school can provide it. They are a far better answer to a capacity shortfall than a demonstration video, and they let a school deliver entitlement-level practical science to every pupil rather than only to those who happen to attend a well-equipped department.

What School and Trust Leaders Can Do Before 2028

The lead time is short, but it is real. Leaders can start now by auditing current Triple Science provision and identifying the cohorts and sciences they cannot offer today. The next step is to map where the binding constraint actually sits, whether it is lab capacity, technician time, specialist staffing or timetable space, because the right response differs in each case. From there, a focused pilot can use virtual labs to expand practical capacity for the specific gaps, prioritising the disadvantaged cohorts the entitlement is meant to reach.

The Triple Science entitlement is a genuine opportunity to widen access to the separate sciences, but only for schools that have a way to deliver practical science at scale. The schools that plan their delivery route now, rather than waiting for buildings and staff that will not arrive in time, will be the ones ready when first teaching begins in 2028.

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