Conflicting claims have been made recently about an alleged decline in physical science enrolments in Australian secondary schools, colleges and universities. In a previous paper (Jennings and Carras, 1979) we investigated these claims using Western Australian enrolment figures and found that there was no evidence of a decline in the numbers studying physical science in W .A. However high school enrolments in Biology have grown more rapidly than those in Physics and Chemistry. We attributed this to a number of factors including the perceived difficulty of physical science subjects and the wide range of optional courses now available to upper secondary students
