TS-9.3

teachwire.net/secondary Drive forward your students' COMPUTING SKILLS Paul Thornton sets out the case for why schools can’t afford to leave computing off the KS4 curriculum… E very child in every school in England to have a world- leading computing education. ” That’s the vision being pursued the National Centre for Computing Education. It’s an aspiration that simply won’t be feasible until every child has at least the opportunity to access computing or computer science across all Key Stages – yet just under half of all secondary schools have barely any provision for post-KS3 computer science at all, in a country that needs 240,000 pupils to leave school with a computing qualification if the demands of industry over the coming years are to be met. With technology evolving at such a rapid rate, the jobs we’re equipping our students to be ready for probably don’t exist yet. Under the old ICT curriculum we’d simply teach basic lessons about the contemporary technology of the time. We need now to be giving students a solid understanding of the how the technology that surrounds them actually works, and more importantly, give them the ability to adapt to the persistent technological changes that will inevitably occur during their lifetimes. In 2014, a new curriculum was introduced that attempted to remodel computing as a foundational subject that would be taught alongside English, maths and science from primary school onwards. The upshot of this meant that from as young as 4, a child could be learning computational thinking and problem solving skills as part of their school’s daily curriculum. This has largely continued into KS3 to an extent, but problems tend to arise at KS4, with students often abruptly cut off of from learning opportunities with respect to computing. Only 61.3% of schools offered a GCSE computer science qualification in 2018, with The Roehampton Annual Computing Education Report report (see bit.ly/ts-racer ) highlighting how “There is hardly any timetabled computing in KS4 for non- exam classes.” If around 75% of all students study no computing or computer science past the age of 14, we're failing to equip our students for life in the modern world. A life skill It’s vital that we do so. This may involve ensuring that GCSE computer science remains an option, or failing that, embedding computing within the wider KS4 curriculum. In either case, the curriculum content needs to be there. There are many who believe that ‘computing’ and ‘coding’ are one and the same; that only certain ‘types’ of students have facility to learn how to code, and that the subject is therefore a niche one we needn’t concern ourselves with making more widely available. This is a fundamental misconception that needs to be addressed. Computing amounts to far more than just coding – it’s a fundamental life skill that enables students to solve problems through the application of logic, decomposition, abstraction and pattern identification. When teachers are equipped with the appropriate skills, computing can ably complement most other subjects. Primary schools have understood this for a while. As the years have gone by, I’ve seen for myself how the Y7s passing through my classroom door became progressively more confident in their problem solving, displayed an aptitude for creating algorithms and successfully developed simple applications using graphical programming languages that ran on physical hardware. For me, the question is whether secondary schools are ready to continue challenging these pupils, keeping them engaged and encouraging them to take any interest they may have in computing science with them into KS4, with the same enthusiasm we see from them aged 11. Or should we simply resign ourselves to the fact that their interest and ability in computing will wane over the course of their secondary journey? It’s something we’ve seen so often before, especially when it comes to take-up of the subject among girls at KS4. "Computing amounts to far more than just coding – it’s a fundamental life skill" “ 56