At a recent First Tech Challenge event, a team of young women showed me the design of their robot. They were proud, enthusiastic and passionate; “before this we would never have considered a career in engineering, but now we wouldn't consider anything else”. It was a deeply inspiring conversation.
We should be inspiring exactly that kind of excitement through the computing curriculum at school. The world is suffused with digital technology; computing is a deep, rich, fascinating discipline, and it is the path to rewarding and well-paid jobs. What's not to like? And yet as a nation we are not yet doing a good job of inspiring our young people in this area. Many children are leaving school without even being digitally literate, let alone "inspired". Girls are heavily under-represented; there are actually fewer hours of computing taught at Key Stage 3 than was the case 15 years ago (from 5.4% of timetabled hours to 2.2%); and fewer computing-relevant qualifications taken at Key Stage 4 (from 71% of students taking a digital qualification in 2013 to 28% in 2023).
What is going on?
Start with the good bits. The 2014 national curriculum for computing aims (I quote) to ensure that all pupils:
- can understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation
- can analyse problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems
- can evaluate and apply information technology, including new or unfamiliar technologies, analytically to solve problems
- are responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology
These are good aims!
We remain the only country in the world that explicitly embraces the idea that computing is a foundational subject discipline that, like maths or natural science, all children should learn - not because they will all become mathematicians or scientists, but so that they can be citizens with agency, able to make well-informed judgements about the complex natural and digital world that surrounds them.
In thinking about how these lofty aspirations have "landed", it is helpful to identify three cohorts of students:
A) The potential software developers of the future: they will create digital technology
B) The potential knowledge workers of the future (accountants, doctors, scientists, lawyers, game designers, business leaders, policy makers, and so on): they will make deep use of digital technology
C) The citizens of the future: to thrive, they must be digitally literate, well equipped to use digital technology and make well-informed judgments about it
As it turns out, we are doing a reasonably good job for cohort A, but a rather poor job for cohorts B and C. Moreover, cohort A is small (at most 20% of the cohort), and heavily skewed towards males.
It is possible to see why this has come about, and hence what we might hope to do about it.
- Computing is the only subject whose GCSE does not cover its own national curriculum. The GCSE in Computer Science, which I love, by design tends towards the techy, academic end of the subject, addressing cohort A. (Initially there was a sister GCSE in ICT, but that was subsequently discontinued).
- By the time a student has adopted an EBacc diet of a Maths GCSE, two English, three Sciences, a language, and a humanity, they are left one or two GCSE slots in which the Computer Science GCSE is competing with Art, Drama, PE, and many others.
- There is a backwash from these Key Stage 4 qualifications into Key Stage 3. Neither schools nor pupils have a strong incentive to study computing if it "isn't leading to anything".
- To study computing we need computing teachers, who continue to be in short supply. We also need computers and internet connections that work. Both of these critical resources are in particularly short supply in disadvantaged schools, exacerbating under-representation problems.
These issues are explored in more detail in the Royal Society's new report System upgrade required (PDF).
What can be done?
Education is complicated, and rife with unintended consequences. But in this case there are strong reasons to be optimistic. Most people can see the value in our children having a great education in computing, because it is so important for their future lives, and for our prosperity as a nation. Companies, universities, non-profits, civil servants… everyone wants to help. And the subject itself really is fascinating (OK, I admit that I am biased) and really is a pathway to rewarding jobs. I think we should take a system-wide look at computing education, thinking explicitly about cohorts A, B, and C, and the pathways they take through our education system.
- At primary school we don't need to distinguish the cohorts, and there is plenty of good practice. (See, for example, the Barefoot CAS programme).
- Cohort B: design a GCSE in computing that is specifically intended for students who are interested in what they can do with computing, rather than primarily interested in creating digital technology themselves. Loosening the EBacc expectation would give subjects like computing, art, etc room to breathe.
- Cohort C: every young person should leave school "digitally literate". Digital literacy comprises the knowledge and skills needed to flourish as a well-informed participant in a pervasively digital world. (Note: knowledge and skills, DL is more than knowing how to underline in Word).
The devil is in the details, of course. For example:
- What incentives are there for every school to teach, and every child to study, digital literacy? I think that some kind of DL qualification is going to be essential; and that it should be designed in tandem with similar movements in maths and English. (AQA's report "A, B, C, it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3; towards new assessments for Numeracy, Literacy and Digital Fluency" is very insightful).
- Should we have a GCSE in Computer Science (as now) and a new GCSE in Applied Computing, or a single, broader GCSE in Computing?
- How can we best recruit, support, and inspire computing teachers?
- How crippling is the shortage of computing equipment, and how can we fix that?
- How should computing education at school respond to the AI revolution? (You might be interested in why we should (still) teach our children to code, and a subsequent Raspberry Pi post on that topic).
Some of these issues may be addressed by the government's independent Curriculum and Assessment Review, so it is tempting to say “oh, we can just leave it to the Review”. But this Review (quite sensibly) designed to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, so it is far from a silver bullet.
Computing is for everyone, not just for the boys, not just for the elites, not just for the nerds. We - academics, companies, non-profits, schools, universities - owe it to our young people to continue to work together to figure out how to do a better job, so that the excitement about their robot expressed to me by those young women can be more widely shared.
