The End of Computing My Friends

Computing in schools, has it gone terribly wrong?

It was back in 2013 that I  wrote a blog in ComputerworldUK entitled The End of ICT my Friends which presaged the whole-scale deprecation of ICT in the school curriculum by the then Education Secretary Michael Gove.

The reasons for ICT’s demise were easy to understand. ICT had become little more than training in MS Office applications (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook and PowerPoint). Proficiency with  these applications had been identified by the previous Labour Government as essential modern workplace skills and through their quango BECTA had zealously introduced computers (suitably equipped) to all schools.

Then it all went pear-shaped. In 2011, the famously ‘flabbergasted’ Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, lambasted the almost complete absence of computing in the curriculum of the country that produced Turing and so many of computing’s pioneers. But also in the tradition of the double whammy, it had at that time become painfully obvious that the costs of Microsoft Office licencing to education was, shall we say, poorly controlled.

The rest is history as we say; ICT was given the chop, the BCS was summoned (British Computer Society), MIT’s Scratch programming endorsed by all and by 2015 62,000 students (nearly 15,000 girls) took GCSE Computing.

And there the story should end, all British mini Turings being turned out on a regular basis, evil Microsoft consigned to ignominy with only Geography trying to keep ‘Death by Powerpoint’ alive. But, there is always a but, all may not be well as we approach the 2016  9-1 revamped, ‘demanding’ world-class GCSEs ( viz ‘hard’ ) having had the GCE A Level updated in 2015 in a similar macho way.

You guessed it, we are struggling with numbers, the number of students wanting to do computing that is. The new GCSE and GCEs are hard and getting harder. It looks like every crusty/nerdy/stackoverflow BCSesque illuminatus has put their pet ‘indispensable’ knowledge into every nook and cranny. This is deja vu all over again. The same thing happened when all the GCSEs were created 30 years ago. ‘Experts in their fields’ created a curriculum that took 210% of the available time. Maggie Thatcher never forgave education experts for their idiocy.

So pity the poor ICT teacher trying to convert to Computing at their school, even Comp Sci graduate will still have to do his prep to teach much of the syllabuses ( I say ‘his’ as the number of Comp Sci girls is very small). Except Comp Sci graduates already have jobs that pay better and are less stressful.

Don’t worry we can fill the gap with folk from Eastern Europe they have loads of coders looking for jobs (my colleague is from Slovenia); oops we’ve Brexit to contend with so that’s banjaxed that idea. Oh, and I forgot to mention, now that we don’t teach ICT most of our youngsters come out without MS Office skills …  as our parents constantly remind us. Good job immigrants do have these skills … rats! I forgot about immigration targets. Maybe we should not be looking to schools for the future of British coders obviously we will find them in the new CTC Universities ( City Technology Colleges). What? they’re only half full. Oh dear.

Did I mention that the small uptake numbers for computing means small option groups, which means big costs for schools ( I teacher - 3 students at GCE? 1-7?) during a funding crisis.

So here we go again ‘The End of Computing my Friends’.  

I give it two years.