UK Schools ICT to be replaced by computer science programme

I'm from England, I left school in 2008 with 3 GCSEs (which is considered <i>failing</i> high school here) and the absolute biggest problem with education here in England is it's not <i>education</i> it's just <i>doing work</i> / remembering information -- not sure if this affects other countries, I would assume so but I've not experienced any other education system.<p>I had an absolutely fantastic IT teacher, he really cared about technology and teaching and he was the best teacher I've ever had but he was <i>very</i> restricted by the curriculum. This was a teacher who enjoyed programming and could teach it, he could teach complex (relative to the classes intelligence level) computing things and teach it in a way we could understand, but the material he was forced to teach was awful, absolutely awful. For my entire last year of school my required work was (If I remember correctly (this is how awful it was, I do not remember it well today)) write an explanation / brief about a microsoft access database system, the extent of our freedom was to choose the subject (dvd store, grocery store etc) and this was an entire years worth of work.<p>What we need is two things, teachers who really care about teaching and providing a real education <i>and</i> a good curriculum that promotes <i>learning</i> not consumption (and subsequent regurgitation) of information. I left high school and in the last 4 years of it I really did not learn anything that is useful to me today, everything I need to know today is stuff I was taught early on, the last 4 years was being given information to consume, information that as soon as I left the classroom was absolutely worthless.<p>The IT teacher I had left the school after a year to teach in Switzerland, I think that's pretty telling. The system we have pushes good teachers away and the shitty ones who are just content reciting material stick around, I would also assume relevant to this point is a teacher I had of Spanish is still with the school, but he is such a bad teacher they re-assigned him after many years to "cooking". Someone the school deemed qualified and able enough to teach Spanish for many years is now using his full power to teach cooking?

"Children are being forced to learn how to use applications, rather than to make them. They are becoming slaves to the user interface and are totally bored by it"<p>That's a remarkably smart thing for a politician to say about computing education.

This is really great news. Lots of people in the UK have been pummeling on Michael Gove to make this change and it's good to see that it's happening. With Raspberry Pi and it being Alan Turing Year we can be hopeful about the future of computer education in the UK.

This makes me slightly too happy. I lost less than 1% in Computing A-Level and am on track for a 1st at university, yet I barely scraped a B at GCSE ICT and have memories of writing ~sentence an hour. Hopefully this will increase university standards as well, the ability to program in the slightest is not a requirement at most UK universities because not every school even offers Computing A-Level.<p>I consider ICT a remnant of times when every-one didn't have their own computer, and teaching them just to use one was a genuine skill. And if I ever hear of hierarchical marking ever again I will murder some-one (you can't achieve the hard marks without first achieving the low ones).

The HN title should be modified to reflect that this applies to <i>England</i> not the UK as a whole.<p>[Apologies for, yet again, playing the role of the bad tempered Scot.]

I have worked as the designated IT Tech at schools across several counties in the UK. In some junior schools the role of I.T co-ordinator is just given to the newest/youngest most unsuspecting teacher. Usually they have no specific ICT knowledge or interest in the subject. There is a vast difference in the quality of ICT teaching at the younger age it doesn't provide a standard foundation for this new curriculum to sit upon.<p>Students arriving at high school at 11 have such different experiences of ICT. The curriculum they need going forward needs to have flexibility to teach what's individually challenging &#38; help those above average to excel &#38; not get bored.<p>The schools that I've seen integrate ICT successfully separate the 'use' of IT day-to-day from the teaching about of the history, theory &#38; application of the subject. For example groups in the class using laptops to type up a project vs sitting in the ICT suite to learn to write instructions to control robots/traffic light sequences etc.<p>It's not fair to consitute word processing, e-mail, or desktop publishing as learning ICT anymore. It's like providing a lesson on using the telephone, it's not needed now they're a universal method of communication.<p>Now sitting at a computer to do general work doesn't constitute ICT learning.<p>Integrating ICT into the classroom works well. You have no idea how long it takes to take 30+ excited pupils down to the ICT suite, to keep them calm, get them logged on with their own username &#38; password and to start a lesson. The lesson is half over by then.<p>Had I been exposed to the world of programming in a structured way I would have jumped into it feet first &#38; would no doubt have many years experience by now. I can vividly remember being around 12 and wishing to know how I could build websites &#38; to learn how to code and not knowing where to start or who to ask. I assumed that it was for college/university level. College focused on building relational databases &#38; the data protection act, Then at University I was thrown in with already proficient programmers.<p>Even though I had 16 years within the academic system I feel the majority of what resonates with me has all been self taught in the last few years since leaving University.<p>The new curriculum needs to show pupils exactly what's possible with the power &#38; scope of CS skills and that it's accessible from a young age.

Absolutely glad to see this, however, there are some serious concerns which are addressed at the bottom of the article<p>"There are, of course, significant challenges to overcome, specifically with the immediate shortage of computer science teachers."<p>When I was an ICT teacher I was the only teacher I met who had any programming experience whatsoever. A large number of these teachers would even struggle with GCSE level maths and I do find it difficult to see how to government could train all these teachers to be able to be at a level necessary to teach any programming skills. Unfortunately those people who are qualified very rarely enter teaching.

In case anyone from outside the UK is thinking "Wow, those brits are doing really well here, I wish my country could take such a sensible approach to computing education", well you're kind of right, it's an enormous improvement, but I feel it needs to be made clear just how bad the situation is right now, before the changes come into effect.<p>I'm a geek who now has a degree in CS, and at school IT lessons were pretty much my least favourite lesson apart from Games. We didn't <i>learn</i> <i>anything</i>. That's not hyperbole, I really doubt anyone learned anything in those lessons. And it wasn't like I was so amazing I knew it all already, everyone knew it all already. I've been in lessons where I already know the content, and what happens is people get stuck and you can help them out. That never happened, everyone already knew what they were doing, because we already wrote our essays in Word, did our class presentations in Powerpoint and our experimental data collation in Excel. We knew it already and the exercises were just asinine.<p>Everything I knew about CS before I started my degree, I taught myself.<p>Also, the school I was at was officially an "IT/Maths specialist school" or something like that (edit: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_Computing_College" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_Computing_Coll...</a>), and in the year I graduated it won The Sunday Times' State School of the Year award.

I worked at a publicly funded inner city technology center in one of the larger UK cities whose mandate was to integrate technology into the curriculum of the surrounding schools. I can not tell you how much potential was wasted. Huge computer labs essentially used as annex class rooms. spyware installed to make sure kids weren't "googling bad things" or "speaking ill of their teachers in email". There were attempts to teach programming but the few kids that were interested had to come after hours and use notepad to write javascript to run in internet explorer from the desktop (not a bad way to learn just how easy it is really, I am just saying there was no official support/classes for such programs).<p>So in short: I really hope this is a sign of change but I also know that money thrown at these programs is often just squandered on projectors and digital white boards.<p>edit: upon reflection I think I feel guilty that I did not do more to make things the way I envisioned. I could have easily created a "programming class" image that we flashed the systems with to let them have linux, learn emacs, vim, apache etc. but I think I was too inexperienced to really be sure of myself. I'd love the opportunity now as I could offer a scratch/squeak course, a scheme course, web apps, lua/love for game programming. So many awesome free tools for every type of aptitude.

All I can say is, why has it taken them so long? Both the problem and the solution have been obvious for /years/. However, I'm glad the gov't have finally obtained some clue on this issue.

I've found that ICT has had such a damaging effect on my generation's perception of what CS is and what the people that do it must be like. I'm really glad to see it go. It's great to know that people will get a chance to have some insight into a world which a lot of people would never encounter.<p>I'd like to think that this was a result of the e-petition started a few months ago too.

Can't quite express how glad I am to see this news. For reasons I can't quite fathom it's genuinely cheered my day. Kudos to the DfE.

I think this is a great move. Although it would be interesting to see how many people actually take the new subject.<p>The problem at the moment is as the article says, just get used to Microsoft GUIs and not know anything behind them. And what happens is people do other things in the lesson, as they get bored, or find it to easy so they don't even bother. The whole MS access stuff can be very dull.<p>They could even bring in sections of web development into the new course, ie setting up a LAMP environment and learning PHP. And not just learning to create table (shudders) based rubbish in Dreamweaver or the like.<p>Or on the comp sci/software dev side of things learn Java programming for Android. Although I would think that iOS dev would be a step too far at this stage - not sure?<p>Or maybe start teaching them a high level languages such as Python or Perl to help give them a good understanding of programming practises etc.

This is great news. However just think of how hard it is to hire software developers. Now how the hell are schools (with fixed salary caps and a work environment filled with children) going to compete?

ICT is learning how to use computers efficiently, how to do a non-computer job like accounting on computers., basically how to use Office. Computer Science is different, and now that home computers are common enough could easily be done at the same time (school years) as ICT. This divide of using or creating goes on forever, my options of courses for next year are Business IT (supporting those people who are just using Office) or Programming (making programs, though possibly only in Java).

Back in 1993 I was doing GCSE Computer Studies which included everything from desktop publishing to writing simple BASIC programs. But when I want to continue this into A-level, I had to personally convince the computer studies teacher to let me do it on my own since the school didn't offer it as an option. In the end, I did a mostly self-taught AS Computer Studies with some guidance from the teacher.<p>I was extremely lucky to have a well-resourced school and a flexible teacher

This interview with Simon Peyton-Jones seems very relevant, the points made are so similar to what Michael Gove says here that it makes one wonder :)<p>relevant part starts at 19:19 <a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/YOW-2011-Simon-Peyton-Jones-Closer-to-Nirvana" rel="nofollow">http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/YOW-2011-Simon-Peyton...</a>

I loved the picture's caption accompanying the article: "Schools will be free to use teaching resources that will equip pupils for the 21st Century". The picture then shows young pupils using aging CRTs. It made me smile :)

The problem is that Google and a lot of newer companies fetishise CS ie computer science to an insane degree. What indistry realy wants and needs is some one who can take a problem and produce a suitable solution which is much more computer engineering.<p>What you don’t want is more ivory tower geeks writing in lisp who obsesses about algorithmic purity and can produce noddy systems that work for some cases but will break badly in the real world.<p>One example from the 80's I was helping build billing systems for BT I also had to run the system and make sure it all worked properly. The first time we hit £1,000,000 in a month (about $5,000,000) in today’s money ) we had a small celebration and I recall the CTO (one of Vints reports I believe) nudging me and saying "this had better be right or we are both out of a Job"<p>Its like saying we need more engineers like Ross Brawn I know lets train more physicists 10 years later you have 200 Brian Cox's and not 195 Ross Brawns and 5 Brian Cox's working at Cern