Look inside Llewellyn’s new lab

Meet chemistry teacher, Llewellyn Lancaster, who teaches at Launceston College in Cornwall, where he was a pupil from years 7 to 13. He then completed a degree and a chemistry PhD at the University of Exeter, before working on organic reaction mechanisms in ionic liquids in Tom Welton’s group at Imperial College London. In 2005, he started secondary teaching and currently teaches sciences to KS3 and KS4, plus chemistry (and sometimes BTEC applied science) to KS5.

Tell us about Launceston College

When I was student, the labs were very traditional, with hardwood furniture. The chemistry classroom even had eye-level reagent shelves, fully stocked with bottles of dilute acids and alkalis. Things were very different in the 1980s! It was in this room that I learned as a sixth-former why anti-bumping chips are important, having seen the mixture I was heating to reflux hit the ceiling.

Launceston has seen significant population growth over the last 20 years. Launceston College now has over 1400 students and a sixth form with over 100 students. The increasing population in Launceston meant we had to expand our buildings to accommodate our increasing roll. The work began in 2021 and our new science department now has 13 labs, two prep rooms and two seminar rooms.

And what are your new labs like?

We moved to our new building on 13 November and feel proud to work in what must be the newest purpose-built laboratories in the South West. We feel very fortunate to have had a lot of input into the design of the laboratories.

The set-up looks very much like a university lab, which is intentional – we want to emphasise this to raise the aspirations and expectations of our students.

And what makes it unique?

Probably my obsession with water. All chemists would agree that water is properly weird. It has such unexpected properties: it’s a liquid despite low molecular mass; it’s covalent but dissolves ionic substances, the solid is less dense than the liquid; and so many more examples. I always ask my sixth form students to calculate the concentration of water, and then get them to think about what a 1 mol per dm³ solution looks like from the solute’s viewpoint. After all, there are reasons for using 1 M as a standard concentration.

What if you had an unlimited budget?

I would like to have a supply of dry ice and liquid nitrogen. I would use dry ice to illustrate the difference in volumes between solids and gases, demonstrate sublimation and show the acidity of carbon dioxide – drop a piece of dry ice into a tall cylinder of sodium hydroxide solution with universal indicator, and the colour will go from purple through to orange. Liquid nitrogen is great for comparing the strength of the triple covalent bond to the weakness of the intermolecular forces. And I’d love to try making ice cream with liquid nitrogen.

Any thoughts on decorating your lab?

I don’t suppose I’ll ever be the first occupant of a school lab again in my teaching career. When I was at Imperial, Tom’s group moved into a newly refurbished lab. I made my mark there during week one, with an exothermic reaction that got a little excitable – the entire contents of the flask decorated the sash of my new fume hood with a sticky mixture. Hopefully I won’t redecorate my workspace a third time.