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Teachers and students often talk about'relevance'as a determinant of what interests them in their chemistry courses, and few people today would argue against the general principle of making chemistry-or any other subjectrelevant. Osborne and Collins' study of pupils' and parents' attitudes to science (200 1) confirms what every teacher knows: students like to relate chemical principles to everyday things. But how can this general principle be translated into practice?

Looking back over the last two decades or so, one of the most discernible trends in chemistry curricula has been to use contexts and applications of chemistry as a means of developing chemical principles. A variety of interpretations of'context'is possible: they include social, economic, environmental, technological and industrial applications of chemistry. At primary and secondary level, the over-riding selection criterion for contexts has been their …