Richard Pike

In 2008, for example, he highlighted the fact that most universities run remedial mathematics courses for new chemistry students, as “many have not opened a textbook on the subject for over two years”, in contrast to countries such as China, India and Japan where all high school students study mathematics up to the age of 18.

In 2009 he found that a “higher tier” GCSE mathematics paper intended for the country’s brighter young mathematicians was easier than 11-plus practice papers from 1960 with which he had compared it. Last year he attacked the government for funding students doing “Mickey Mouse” degrees – and called for the money to be spent on science instead.

One of Pike’s best known initiatives was the “Five-Decade Challenge” in 2008, during which 1,300 of the country’s brightest 16 year-olds sat a two-hour chemistry exam. O-level questions from the 1960s were mixed with those from later decades, the most recent from a GCSE exam set in 2005. When the vast majority found themselves stumped by the earlier questions, Pike declared that this was hard evidence of a catastrophic decline in the standard of science teaching in schools.

Pike had little doubt that the problem was perverse incentives which give politicians, examining bodies, quangos and schools a vested interest in maintaining low standards, creating a disastrous “race to the bottom”. MPs, he claimed, had admitted that they had no interest in making exams tougher because they did not want to upset middle-class parents who now expect their children to achieve strings of A grades.

Meanwhile, schools were reluctant to jeopardise their league table positions and exam boards were keeping their papers “meaninglessly easy” because they were afraid of losing business by making their papers harder than those of their competitors.

“This is not a broken system that has to be fixed — it is a corrupted edifice that must be razed to the ground and rebuilt,” Pike declared. “We cannot continue to live the lie of ever-increasing standards while businesses struggle to recruit staff with numeracy skills.”

Richard Andrew Pike was born on April 2 1950 and educated at Gosport County Grammar School and Downing College, Cambridge, where he took a First in Engineering and went on to do a PhD in experimental and theoretical aspects of vapour bubble dynamics in boiling. His research involved examining the thermal and fluid characteristics of water and organic liquids in different gravitational fields, including Earth and zero gravity.

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