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My two bob's worth -
One of the major reasons why students do not pursue Physics and the 'harder' Mathematics subjects is because universities have removed them as prerequisites form their courses. This has encouraged students to chase subjects that will 'boost' their ATAR without necessarily giving them a good grounding in the required skills. It would be really interesting to see data that compares the decline in numbers of students against the removal of prerequisite subjects for courses, sadly the data isn't available.
There are significant numbers of engineering students who are switching from the engineering sector into teaching these days but their grounding, through no fault of their own in topics like electromagnetism, light and matter, astronomy, relativity etc is poor and often dates back to their own days in high school. I have not seen a 'pure' Physics student teacher on teaching rounds at my school for the best part of ten years. And I've only supervised two 'pure' Physics trainee teachers in the past sixteen years. There are some out there - but my goodness they are few and far between!
Paul
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