Three years ago, before the Brexit dreams of renewed imperial glory and Vimto for all took wing, England took an uncharacteristically bold step into the future. Michael Gove was in charge of the Department for Education, and he appeared to make good his promise to revolutionise the teaching of computing in schools. He damned the subject known as information and communication technology (or ICT), which its detractors – with a good deal of justification – said was too often reducible to showing kids how to use PowerPoint. “About as much use as teaching children to send a telex or travel in a zeppelin,” said Gove. The new thing, he enthused, was computer science, and a drive to ensure that schools would now show their pupils “not just how to work a computer; but how a computer works, and how to make it work for you”.
Five-year-olds were to be shown how to code; those aged seven to 11 would be introduced to “sequence, selection, and repetition in programs”. In 2015, after a long period of groundwork, it was announced that a new GCSE in computer science was to be introduced. At last, there seemed to be an institutional recognition that the future – or, in reality, the present – could not just be based around such Gove-ite articles of faith as the 12 times table, the ability to spot “fronted adverbials” and old-fashioned classroom discipline, but HTML and JavaScript.
And so to reality, and a country increasingly hit by schools cuts, with a decaying government so consumed by leaving the EU that it seems not to hear any complaints, let alone listen to them. Ten days ago, the reality of the teaching of computing in schools was laid bare by a report from the Royal Society, and it was not pretty. More than half of England’s schools are still not offering computer science GCSEs. At the last count, the proportion of the country’s pupils who actually sat the exam was a miserable 11%. There is a pronounced gap between rural and urban areas. To cap it all, there is still a lack of girls studying computer science: only 20% of GCSE candidates in the past year were female, and only 10% of female students decided to carry the subject on at A-level.
For more read the full of article at The Guradian.
