Mea Culpa. About twenty years ago I campaigned with others to get rid of compulsory ICT at GCSE in UK schools and replace it with computing, ( Computer Science as it would be called). We fought bitter battles with EduGeek, the DFE, Microsoft, Research Machines (RM) and others. Good days for the Open Source world.
The reasoning was clear in that:
1) it was obvious that ICT served simply as vocational traing in the use of Microsoft Office and that the cost of MSOffice licencing in schools was a scandalous rip off, all aided and abetted by a now defunct but then powerful quango called BECTA.
2) Coding, egineering and programming skills were, as a result of the above, absent from a generation of students and that this was a 'bad thing'.
To cut a long story short, indeed ICT was dropped as a complsory subject and replaced by computing but no-one saw the Micheal Gove reforms coming! Basically GCSEs were now too easy ( by UK HM Gov Dept of Education's reckoning) and were made harder, a lot harder.
Unexpectedly having long retired I returned to school teaching in 2015 to fill a part-time vacancy for Computer Science despite being well into my sixties. Apparently the old ICT teachers were struggling and failing with computing, so duly left.
By 2017, no-one in the school was getting any ICT but oh boy was GCSE Computing tough!
The syllabuses were not dull if you were a full on geek, full of abstractions and concepts. Interesting for a mixed class of 15 yr olds? Not at all. Could you wing you way through it? No you could not.
Once computing became optional then although every student would acknowledge its importance in the modern world its numbers crashed. Worse it attracted a certain type ( yes we all know who we are) of student. Inevitably proportionally speaking, few of which were female.
Today The Guardian newspaper reports that in 2023, 4 out of every 5 Computing students at GCSE are male.
They did not have figures for A Level Computing ( really quite tough now) or university entrance numbers but it is safe to assume on past experience that the numbers of females falls proprortionately at each step. In other words, as The Guardian has worked out for itself ,the 'New World' dominated by IT and of course AI, is overwhelmingly male.
With hinsight I regret our success in wiping out ICT, and I regret the elitist approach to computing. Sorry. Unintended consequences. Can I blame the Tories? Only for putting a narrow ideology above pragmatism and cocking up the implementation but that's not exactly a surprise to anyone in any sector in 2024.
Does it matter? Again past experience shows that when males have complete dominance over their world they create it in their image.
Maybe that's not a good thing?
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