I think the problem is they want calculus in the curriculum and it is too late to be able to put it in context. There are some great uses for calculus that are

I think the problem is they want calculus in the curriculum and it is too late to be able to put it in context. There are some great uses for calculus that are accessible to many high school students. In particular, with physics you usually learn about capacitors and nuclear decay. Both of these cases are basically solving the differential equation y' = ky but: - the physics course can’t depend on the concurrent maths course because you are allowed to take physics without taking maths, so you just learn weird equations full of exponential a instead of the ODE - I think the maths course doesn’t even teach differential equations. They are in FP1 (from a separate ‘further maths’ course) but definitely not in AS (penultimate year of school) maths. Possibly a few turn up in A2 (final year) but then they can’t have any good examples from physics because not everyone doing maths will be able to depend on knowledge about what a capacitor is or how nuclear decay works. But I guess population models might work. - there can be some better stuff in the further maths course (e.g. I think they might even have the ‘exponentiate a matrix’ solution to systems of first order linear ODEs)