The school has a shared physics and chemistry laboratory, a biology room, and a full time laboratory technician, which is unusual for an island school and is the reason the science stream exists here.
What this means for students. Practical work is done rather than described. Every science student in grades nine and ten does at least one practical period a week, and the senior groups do two. Students write their own method and their own results, including the results that did not work, and a report that has plainly been copied from a neighbour is returned unmarked.
The rules. Closed shoes, hair tied, no food or drink, no student in either room without a teacher, and the technician's word on anything to do with a chemical or a cylinder is final, including over a teacher's. Those are the whole list and none of them is flexible. A student sent out of a laboratory for one of them does the practical at another time with the technician and their family is told.
What we do not have: enough of anything to give every student their own apparatus in a class of thirty, so practical work in grades nine and ten is done in fours. The senior groups work in pairs.
The laboratories are also used by the feeder schools twice a term, when their grade nine and ten classes come over on the boat for a practical morning. That arrangement costs us two mornings and is the least we can do, given that those students may be sitting beside ours in two years.