By the time you read this article, applications will have been received for this year's Brenda Keogh Award and members of the Primary Science Committee will be ploughing their way through them, sifting, deliberating, debating and sighing as they go, in an attempt to find two worthy winners. In some ways, it is disheartening to read the applications and discover how starved of support for science some of our schools are and how isolated our subject leaders feel.