Today, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, will give a speech at the BETT Show announcing that the current ICT lessons in schools will be scrapped from this Sept to be replaced by compulsory lessons which will now include design and programming.
Hear! Hear!
We’ve been campaigning for this for many, many years as long term readers will know. (see Coding in the Classroom and other posts) Gove will say “Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word or Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations”.
It seems to me to be madness that fewer and fewer young people want to go on to do Computer Sciences at University. On top of that employers complain that they cannot get home grown people with the required IT skills. Hence they turn offshore. Part of this is their fault in that our industry has not taken on entry-level IT people/apprentices in sufficient numbers for at least a decade now. But the schools are also to blame.
One could ask why the changes have taken so long? Tony Blair was an admitted technophobe. All of the current problems occurred on his watch. At least the new coalition has moved relatively fast. Their ministers do seem to be much more tech savvy than the other lot. I remember talking to George Osborne about tech several years ago and he was really on the ball. Jeremy Hunt, of course, used to run his own IT company. Ed Vaizey (in Hunt’s dept) is credited with the current initiative. See Computer skills are the grammar of the 21st Century.
We can also ask where the rather long in the tooth e-skills was in all this? Not a single mention of them in any announcement today.
The other point to make is that intentions are all very well, but where are the teachers going to come from? Nothing would be worse than promising these exciting lessons in apps development only to find them delivered by the Geography teacher who has read a self help guide the night before. I understand that the IT industry is to be asked to help in this regard. Even then good practioners do not always make good teachers.
Anyway, I applaud this new initiative and will watch carefully to see how it is implemented in practice.