DfE plans to withdraw funding for assistive software, saying it is now rarely needed due to ‘widely available free tools’
Disability campaigners have called on the government to halt plans to cut funding for specialist tech support for tens of thousands of disabled students in England.
Almost 10,000 people have signed a petition opposing Department for Education (DfE) proposals to withdraw funding for specialist assistive software available as part of the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA).
Fashion has a way of reflecting the world around it, and in the 1960s, the world was moving fast. The postwar economic boom had put more disposable income in more pockets than any previous generation had known. Vacation culture was expanding, domestic air travel was becoming accessible to the middle class for the first time, […]
With the constant risk of being recorded, many young people are afraid of showing enthusiasm – let alone doing something so potentially embarrassing as dancing in public. Is there a way to set themselves free?
In a video posted to TikTok, where Katie Whitney has 2.5 million followers, she says to camera, bluntly: “This video is for Cynthia Erivo. If you’re not Cynthia Erivo … you can keep on scrolling.” Her demeanour then shifts, her voice becomes softer; more the way a person might talk to their puppy: “Hi Cynthia. Hi baby. Hey baby. How are you?” It’s toe-curling – or, in modern parlance, cringe – to watch. “I feel traumatised,” says one commenter. Others post photos of a stunned-looking Erivo and imagine: “What if the Wicked star were to actually watch this video?” Cringe!
Now 25, but having started making this kind of content – “weird skits” – at 20, Whitney is part of what is known online as CringeTok, a subsection of the internet that deals in content designed to make your toes curl. It’s in many ways a reaction to a fear of being “cringe”, which is seeping into all parts of life – from social media to classrooms to the workplace.
The Apostle Paul emphasizes that salvation is based on faith in Jesus Christ, not ethnicity or lineage. Only a remnant of Israel will be saved, as true identity comes from spiritual connection rather than genetic heritage. Believers, regardless of their origins, form the true Israel, unified in Christ’s grace.
Jews and people of Jewish descent everywhere - those whom the Zionist state claims to speak for – are uniting to declare their unwavering opposition to Zionism. Since the First Zionist Congress over a century ago, Zionism claimed to speak on behalf of all Jews, while permanently attempting to silence opposition to its constant crimes.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian Zionist, told a gathering of Jewish and other Zionists that the Jews are God's chosen people and they are the foundation of all morality. But nothing could be further from the truth!
The Earth's sphericity negates any privileged location and signifies equality among all people. A divine pathway through Jesus Christ offers salvation to all nations, regardless of birthplace. This revelation, previously hinted at in prophets' teachings, is now openly accessible to the world.
Coalition of more than 100 organisations says move could lead to more children ending up in adult detention facilities
A coalition of more than a hundred refugee children’s organisations has said controversial plans to use AI to assess the age of young asylum seekers could lead to more children wrongly ending up in adult prisons or detention centres.
The warning follows a Home Office announcement on Friday of a contract to roll out AI facial age estimation technology on young asylum seekers whose age is disputed.
The babies were part of a vaccine trial for a respiratory virus in the 1960s and died shortly after. Their families said they had been unaware of the trial until recently.
The teenagers of 1950s America helped create a completely new youth culture, one shaped by economic prosperity, growing independence, and a rapidly changing postwar society. Captured in a memorable series of photographs by photographer Nina Leen, these young Americans appeared confident, stylish, and eager to embrace the opportunities surrounding them. In June 1954, LIFE magazine […]
Faces frozen in time stare out from fragile glass negatives that survived more than a century in silence. Some appear nervous, others defiant or exhausted, each one carrying a story that was nearly forgotten forever. Taken in the small Northern California town of Marysville during the early 1900s, these haunting mugshots offer an unusually personal […]
As part of a growing anti-tech movement, startup dumb.co is pushing flip phones as a way for young people to find ‘social and spiritual freedom’
“They aren’t as dumb as they look,” our facilitator said, referring to the dark gray flip phone in his hand. He just as easily could have been talking about us, the 28 New York residents before him who had signed up to use the device for the entire month of March. He explained that the relic was loaded with WhatsApp, iMessage, Google Maps, Uber, Microsoft 2FA – nothing like my seventh-grade flip phone.
We each had paid $75 to participate in Month Offline, or MO, a program that challenged us to swear off our smartphones entirely. Another $25 went to dumb.co, the company behind MO, for the so-called dumbphones we would use as we navigated daily life.
Britain in the 1960s liked to think of itself as a country moving forward. The postwar recovery was well underway, consumer culture was beginning to bloom, and cities across the country were being promoted as symbols of a new, modern age. Behind that image, in the back streets of Manchester, families were living in conditions […]
New York City, through much of the 20th century, was a place where power operated in the shadows. The Five Families ruled entire neighborhoods, names like Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Frank Costello commanded fear and respect in equal measure, and the city’s underworld hummed along with the quiet efficiency of a criminal […]
Fashion in early 1970s San Francisco reflected a city in the middle of cultural change. The streets became a stage for personal expression, where young women mixed vintage pieces, handmade garments, and bold new trends into looks that felt effortless and individual. Away from the polished pages of fashion magazines, candid street photography captured a […]
There is something striking about looking at a photograph of a teenager from the 1970s. The confidence, the color, the sheer audacity of what they chose to wear speaks louder than any fashion editorial ever could. These were not curated outfits assembled for a camera. They were real kids, in real hallways and real streets, […]
Before a woman could step onto a plane as a stewardess, she had to clear a set of requirements that bore no resemblance to anything related to aviation. No safety certification, no navigation knowledge, no emergency training. The checklist that determined her eligibility was built entirely around her physical appearance, the sound of her voice, […]
Almost 1400 people, including two Nobel laureates, have signed an open letter condemning the US/Israeli attacks on Iranian academicinstitutions. The signatories call on the international community to “protect scientific infrastructure, defend academic life, and uphold the principle that knowledge-serving institutions must never be treated as expendable in war”.
The letter, which is addressed to the United Nations secretary-general, the director-general of UNESCO, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and “the governments of all parties to the conflict”, was instigated by the theoretical condensed-matter physicist Alireza Qaiumzadeh and colleagues from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
The signatories, which include May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser who shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, express their “grave concern” over the attacks that they say have “damaged laboratories, universities, hospitals, and other scientific institutions”.
Organizations that have been attacked include Isfahan University of Technology, Iran University of Science and Technology and the Pasteur Institute of Iran and Sharif University of Technology. During the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and Ben Gurion University were also hit.
“Scientific and educational institutions are civilian spaces essential to public health, knowledge, and human survival,” the letter states. “Their destruction endangers researchers, students, medical personnel, and the broader public, while causing lasting harm to science and society.”
Qaiumzadeh says that many of the Iranian research institutions that have been destroyed were built over decades under sanctions. “My colleagues in Iran are deeply disheartened to see that what they achieved under such difficult conditions has been reduced to rubble,” he says.
Due to the ongoing war, which began on 28 February, many schools, universities and research centres – in which more than 60% of Iranian students in STEM subjects are women – are now closed, with courses forced online under limited internet access.
Particle physicist John Ellis from King’s College London, who is among those who signed the letter, says that he counts many Iranian, Gulf State and Israeli physicists among his colleagues and friends and says he has visited some of the institutions that have been attacked.
“I deplore any and all military attacks on universities, and indeed other educational institutions,” adds Ellis. “I can only hope that this open letter and the publicity it receives may help convince the belligerents to refrain from such attacks.”
The letter now calls on all parties in the war to “immediately” end attacks on civilian scientific and educational sites. “Science is not a military target,” the letter states. “Universities and laboratories must not become battlefields.”
It also calls on international bodies to “document [the] damage”, “protect affected scholars and students” and “support independent investigations into violations of international humanitarian law”.
Qaiumzadeh told Physics World that he finds it “particularly troubling” the scientific bodies, such as academies and international scientific organizations, have remained largely silent during the conflict.
“They must understand that undermining academic institutions will only worsen the situation for those who believe in gradual, constructive change within Iran’s complex society,” he says.
Physicists who go into politics are a rare breed. Most famously there was Angela Merkel, who was chancellor of Germany for 16 years. Climate physicist Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was elected Mexican president in a landslide win in 2024. Alok Sharma, meanwhile, was business secretary in the UK government and president of the COP-26 climate summit.
But Dave Robertson is even more unusual. Having originally studied physics at the University of Liverpool in the UK, he worked as a physics teacher in Birmingham for almost a decade. After spells in the trade-union movement and local politics, Robertson has been the Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Lichfield, Burntwood and the Villages since 2024.
He’s not the only physicist currently serving as an MP. Others include Layla Moran – another former physics teacher – who’s been Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon since 2017. There’s also shadow home secretary Chris Philp, who’s been Conservative MP for Croydon South since 2015.
But Robertson is the only physics-teacher-turned-MP in the current Labour government, which came to power at the 2024 general election. It won a 174-seat landslide majority, though Robertson’s own victory was wafer-thin. He squeaked home by just 810 votes over his Conservative rival Michael Fabricant, who had been Lichfield’s MP for more than 25 years.
In an interview with Physics World, Robertson admits he had little idea of what the job of MP would involve (see box). Describing the British parliament as “a truly bonkers and bizarre workplace”, he divides his time between Lichfield and London. “I try to do four days in my constituency a week and four days in parliament. That doesn’t add up, but if can split my Mondays, I can just about make it work.”
Dave Robertson MP: what happened after I got elected
Dave Robertson recalls the immediate aftermath of his victory in the UK general election on Thursday 4 July 2024.
When you win an election, they give you this envelope. I was expecting a proper, thick A4 envelope, but all they gave me was a single sheet of A4 paper folded in half. It was 4.30 in the morning, I’d had no sleep and I’d been on my feet since 7 a.m. or something stupid. And I thought “I’m not opening this now. I’m going to take it home.”
When I opened it in the morning, it basically said “Congratulations, phone this number.” So I rang and someone said “Oh, when are you coming down to parliament?” And my reaction was “I thought you’d tell me that!” In the end, I went down on the Sunday after the election and I remember walking into Westminster Hall for the first time with the person who was showing me round and she said, “So when was the last time you were in parliament?”
As I put my hand on the door, I had to admit I’d never been in the building before: it was literally the first time I’d ever been there. And it’s nothing like I expected. It is a truly bonkers and truly bizarre workplace. It’s unique and so different to everything else. That comes with its frustrations, but it is also an absolute privilege to be involved – and long may it continue.
Into the classroom
Brought up in Lichfield, Robertson began his physics degree at Liverpool in 2004. Saying he “loved every second” of his time there, Robertson particularly enjoyed nuclear physics. But it was a science-communication course, which Robertson admits he only took because he thought it would be easy marks, that made him realize how much he liked taking complicated concepts and explaining them to non-experts.
After graduating in 2007 and taking a year off, Robertson returned to the Midlands to do a teacher-training degree at the University of Birmingham. The course was largely practical, with Robertson spending most of his time getting hands-on teaching experience at various schools in Birmingham, including one – Great Barr School – that he ended up working at.
Roberston spent seven years as a physics teacher at Great Barr, which was then one of the largest secondary schools in the UK. With about 2500 pupils, it had as many as 16 classes in each year group, from age 11 to 16. Great Barr was also able to offer physics to 17 and 18 year olds who stayed on to do A-levels. “We’d always have one physics group or occasionally two in year 12.”
Rather than just focusing on the syllabus, Robertson would try to make his lessons “loud and engaging” to emphasize the excitement and sheer bizarreness of physics. Claiming he has good control of his voice, Robertson says he would also “put on accents and do silly voices” to keep pupils entertained.
He particularly enjoyed teaching a course called “Science in the news”, where pupils would look into the impact of a particular topic in the syllabus on the wider world. “That was wonderful,” Robertson recalls. “It was effectively a literature review, which let us teach a lot of the skills that we want to see kids developing when they’re learning sciences. It was fascinating.”
Not all pupils enjoyed physics. “For some kids, physics wasn’t their thing – it’s not what drove them,” he says. But he regarded it as “an absolute privilege” to teach students who were engaged with the subject, especially those who went on to study physics at university. One ex-pupil even contacted Robertson after he became an MP to say she’d just passed her PhD. “She’d dropped a note into her thesis thanking Mr Robertson for being an inspiring physics teacher.”
Political moves
Robertson’s time at Great Barr came to an end in 2016 when the school was making job cuts and he accepted voluntary redundancy. After doing supply teaching for about a year, he got wind of a post at the NASUWT teachers’ trade union, which he’d been school rep for at Great Barr. “It was one of those jobs I’d have regretted if I didn’t apply for it,” he says.
It was while working for the NASUWT that Robertson got involved in local politics. He joined the Labour Party and in 2019 was elected to Lichfield District Council, which was then run by the Conservative Party. He also stood in that year’s UK general election, but was beaten by Michael Fabricant, losing by more than 23,000 votes. “I don’t talk about that result,” Robertson jokes.
Heart of the country Dave Robertson was elected as Labour Member of Parliament for the Staffordshire seat of Lichfield, Burntwood and the Villages at the 2024 UK general election, beating the sitting Conservative MP Michael Fabricant by just 810 votes. The former physics teacher serves a semi-rural constituency centred on the cathedral city of Lichfield (pictured). Lying about 30 km north of Birmingham, the constituency also includes farmland, villages and the town of Burntwood. (Courtesy: iStock/Nicholas E Jones)
Robertson is now one of more than 400 Labour MPs and spends most of his time on local Lichfield matters. “My number one focus is very much what’s going on in my constituency, and that will always be the case,” he says. “But I’m very fortunate to be one of a very small number of parliamentarians who’ve got a science background, let alone a physics background.”
That interest saw Robertson host an exhibition in the Houses of Parliament, organized by the Institute of Physics (IOP), in June 2025 to support the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). “Every MP and member of the Lords would have been able to walk past and see that it was the IYQ,” he says. The exhibition was, for him, a great opportunity “to show decision-makers that the UK is one of the world leaders in quantum”.
That month Robertson also hosted a hands-on display of quantum technology for MPs and members of the House of Lords, again organized by the IOP. At the end of 2025 he sponsored another parliamentary reception, this time for physics-based companies that had won IOP Business Awards. “The event was absolutely wonderful,” says Robertson. “Seeing some of the cutting-edge science from companies on show was astonishing.”
Robertson’s focus on science extends to his membership of various cross-party parliamentary groups, including ones about nuclear energy and space. He is also chair of a new group he has set up devoted to quantum science and technology. As a backbench MP, Robertson cannot dictate or implement policy, but he says such groups “can help build up a critical mass of interest in parliament to drive an agenda forwards”.
Spreading the word Dave Robertson (left) at an Institute of Physics event that he sponsored at the Palace of Westminster in June 2025 to inform parliamentarians, including fellow MP Steve Yemm (right), of the commercial applications of quantum science. The event formed part of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. (Courtesy: Barry Willis Photography)
With his background in teaching, Robertson is also keen to highlight the UK-wide shortage of physics teachers. While at Great Barr School – now rebranded as Fortis Academy – he was lucky. “I remember having a physics group meeting,” he says, “where there were six of us around the table and thinking ‘This is more [physics teachers] than most cities have’.”
As a 2025 IOP report pointed out, a quarter of state schools in England have no specialist physics teachers. In fact, more than half of physics lessons for 14–16 year olds are taught by teachers who never studied a physics-related subject beyond the age of 18. Despite some improvement, only 31% of the government’s target number of physics teachers have been recruited, while 44% of new physics teachers quit within five years.
It’s the responsibility of me and other MPs with a scientific background to spark an interest in physics
Dave Robertson MP
Robertson admits that getting the lack of physics teachers on the radar is an uphill battle. “There are 650 MPs but have they all thought about the importance of getting more physics teachers in the classroom? Probably not, if I’m honest. That’s why it’s the responsibility of me and other MPs with a scientific background to spark an interest in physics and unearth the next Paul Dirac or Isaac Newton.”
Robertson would also like to get on the influential science innovation and technology select committee to spread the message about the importance of physics. But he is wary of spending too much time in parliament with other MPs with a scientific background. “It’s more helpful if all of us have tentacles that spread out into other groups and parties and sections of parliament.”
Spreading the message
For the wider physics community, Robertson believes that physicists need to speak out more strongly about how they can tackle many of the world’s problems, notably climate change. “It’s the biggest issue at the moment and a lot of the solutions are going to come from physics,” he says. “Getting more physicists engaged with decision-makers will not only be good for the future of the economy but ultimately for the future of the planet.”
As for Robertson’s own future, he knows that a career in politics is precarious. Voters rarely hold politicians in high regard and will often boot them out on a whim. It’s therefore hard for any MP to have a predictable career path or plan too far ahead. Robertson himself admits to having “no big aspirations” to be a cabinet minister, which is perhaps just as well given that his majority at the last election was so thin.
With the next general election not due to take place until 2029, Robertson is for now focusing squarely on his role as a backbench constituency MP. “The job I have is just about the most wonderful in the world,” he says. “I want to keep doing it because there’s some wonderful things I can do for my community, whether it’s physics, quantum or football.” But if Robertson did get kicked out, at least he can go back into the classroom.
“Rumour has it, we could do with a few more physics teachers.”
Login
