ICT for schoolchildren 3

Education Secretary Michael Gove seems to be content to delegate the design of the school computing curriculum to technology vendors, which he entrusts with the future of UK Computing.

"If we want our country to produce the next Sir Tim Berners-Lee – creator of the Internet Web – we need the very best Computer Science teachers in our classrooms. They need to have the right skills and deep subject knowledge to help their pupils." (DfE Press Release 19 October 2012, corrected 22nd October. See also The Register 19 October 2012)

Did Sir Tim have a good computer science teacher? No, he had a first class degree in physics. There are many notable examples of IT entrepreneurs who studied computing at school and college, but Sir Tim isn't one of them.

I can see no reason to correlate successful innovation (in IT or any other field) with "deep subject knowledge" on the part of one's teachers. Not for the first time, politicians make a fetish of the wrong thing.

ICT for schoolchildren 2

@glynmoody blogs about Opening up Computer Studies in the UK. The Royal Society is now leading a project to investigate the way computing is taught in school, starting by asking some good questions.

Glyn points out that the Advisory Group is packed with vested interests, including Google, IBM and Microsoft. Glyn would like to see some more Open Source representatives, but of course even the Open Source brigade would still represent the desire to pack schools with more and more kit, without questioning its real educational benefit.

Glyn wants children to be encouraged to explore alternative products (e.g. Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org, AbiWord) but I can't see that goes very far in helping to understand "the broader concepts that lie behind computing", whatever those might be. What I think would be much more valuable is for children to learn the advantages and disadvantages of writing using a word processor as compared to old-fashioned paper and pencil, searching for information on the Internet as compared to looking in a reference book, and so on. (Just as in maths, they learn how to do sums using a calculator as well as how to do sums not using a calculator. In my day we used slide rules.)

The problem with computing is that, at this level at least, it isn't a real subject. Schoolkids are trained to use the products of, er, Google, IBM and Microsoft, and maybe these are useful lifeskills, but no more than road safety or telephone skills. Even though many of today's school children will end up working in call centres  (and according to today's Guardian, a third of call centre employees have a degree), we don't expect them to pass exams in telephone studies. (I probably shouldn't say that - some idiot bureaucrat may read this and think it's a good idea.)

In any case, it is a gross parody of education to imagine that it consists purely of training for working life. Schools don't teach geography in the belief that anyone who is any good at the subject will become an explorer, they teach geography on the basis that everyone needs to know some important stuff about the world and its people, just as everyone needs to know a decent amount about science and history and politics and other people's religions.

Clearly there are some ways in which technology can assist students in learning all kinds of stuff, as well as giving all teachers (not just ICT specialists) some new ways of presenting and explaining their subjects. However, there may be a temptation to use computer-mediated learning not just because it is more fun but also because it is cheaper and more easily standardized, which could bias the school curriculum towards those topics that can be taught most efficiently using the new technologies and so threatens to undermine the overall quality and depth of education.

I hope that the Royal Society study is able to be much more radical than merely optimizing the penetration of technology into the minds of schoolchildren.

See my earlier post ICT for schoolchildren.

ICT for schoolchildren

@bryanglick (editor of Computing) worries as the number of GCSE ICT students falls again, reckons it's not good for UK IT.

I asked Bryan if he thought our kids need a GCSE to become computer-literate? Bryan agreed that GCSE is not a measure of computer literacy, but interprets the fall in numbers as an indicator of how few kids are interested in a career in IT (link). I disagree with Bryan's interpretation, and I also disagree that this is a cause for concern.

The Computing story itself provides two main explanations for the falling numbers.

1. ICT as a subject is now considered irrelevant by many children because ICT is used as a tool in so many other subjects. 
2. ICT is seen as a soft touch at GCSE and A-level by many employers (and universities).

At GCSE level, the focus of the ICT course appears to be life skills rather than vocational skills - the computer as a means to an end. My son uses the computer and the internet to do his GCSE coursework in science and history, and for this he has needed to learn techniques for effective search and evaluation of information sources, as well as effective graphical and verbal presentation. Besides his schoolwork, he also uses a range of social tools, from Facebook to Spotify.

As a parent, I am much more concerned about his grades in mathematics, science and history, because these are the subjects that are taken seriously by universities and employers. If he did want to study computer science at Cambridge, for example, the best choice of A-levels would appear to be mathematics, further maths and physics [source: Cambridge University]. ICT is on Cambridge University's list of "soft" subjects, along with home economics and sports science [BBC News, 7 January 2008].


As it happens, my son's school no longer offers a GCSE in ICT anyway. The school has adopted a new diploma called DiDA; we are promised (although with little evidence as yet) that this will be regarded as equivalent to GCSEs. So the total number of kids doing GCSE in ICT is influenced by decisions made by parents and teachers and exam boards, and is not an indicator of how many 14-year-old kids (which is when they choose their GCSE options) want a career in IT.


The fact that schools are downgrading their ICT education needn't be a bad sign for the UK IT industry. As computer and internet literacy among teenagers continues to increase, schools can hopefully go back to teaching more intellectually demanding subjects, at least to those capable of tacking them.


Meanwhile, what does a career in ICT look like - either now or in the future? If I wanted to be provocative, I could identify several tiers. The top jobs in ICT would go (as always) to extremely bright, extremely creative people, from a broad range of intellectually demanding academic disciplines. (Many of the computer pioneers studied mathematics or physics. People who had studied Latin and Greek sometimes became outstanding software engineers.) There would be a middling tier of competent systems developers, who have had a more vocational education including ICT and business studies. And a bottom tier of data entry clerks and operators.

If my son did want a career in ICT, I hope he would aspire for the top jobs. The route to the top jobs in ICT doesn't go via a GCSE in ICT. The health of the UK IT industry depends more on the number of top maths grades than on the number of ICT passes. If the GCSE in ICT vanished altogether, I can't see it would be the end of the world.

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The GCSE is a qualification taken by UK schoolchildren, usually across Years 10 and 11 (ages 14-16). Children may take GCSE in a number of subjects; schools generally offer some compulsory subjects (including Mathematics and English) and some optional subjects; pupils need to choose their GCSE options when they are 13 or 14.