16 September 2011

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, has welcomed the announcement by David Willetts to transform the ICT school curriculum into a computing curriculum.

The Institute, together with the Computing At School^[1] group (CAS), has been campaigning for computer science to be included on the curriculum for a number or years and together they have already developed a model curriculum that describes what computing principles, techniques and concepts children should master by age 16.

Jim Norton, President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT says: ‘This is excellent news and exactly what we, as the Chartered Institute for IT, have been campaigning for in order to ensure that we have the talent UK plc needs for the future, while drawing the distinction between digital literacy and the academic discipline of computer science.’

Many employers, such as Microsoft, Capgemini, Google and IBM are all willing to put their own resources into helping out, as is shown by the Behind the Screen project announced by Mr Willetts. All the groups working in this area will need to support each other if we are going to truly transform what kind of computing we teach in schools.

In August Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman, said ‘I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn't even taught as standard in UK schools. Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made.’

Bill Mitchell, Director of BCS Academy, added 'not only that, we don’t teach kids how computers work and we don’t teach them how to create software for themselves.'

On Thursday David Willetts accepted that Eric Schmidt is right, he launched a new initiative called Behind the Screen to transform the current ICT school curriculum into a computing curriculum. There is massive support and enthusiasm from schoolteachers, professionals, employers, entrepreneurs, parents and children to get computing taught in schools. Computing is a rigorous intellectually challenging subject, which fits perfectly with Nick Gibb’s vision for the new national curriculum.

However, despite Mr Willetts bold steps to remedy the problem, this won’t happen if government does not give clear signals to heads of schools that it’s not just league tables they should worry about, they should also be educating our children in subjects like computing so they can have successful long term careers doing things that make our world a better place to live in.

The digital revolution is accelerating, not slowing down. The web is the latest phase of this revolution. The total value of internet sales by UK non-financial businesses employing 10 or more people in 2008 was £222.9b, up 36.6% on 2007^[2], which shows in economic terms the pace of this change.

The UK needs professionals who can invent new digital technologies, professionals who can integrate those inventions into technology platforms, and professionals who can build software applications that address business needs. We also need professionals capable of protecting our information, our digital infrastructure and our intellectual property.

The best way to make sure we have those professionals is to teach the underpinning principles of computing in school, which are made exciting and relevant through projects based on the latest technology. Although technology changes at an ever faster pace, it is based on underpinning computing principles that only change slowly over the long term. Knowledge about those principles will be useful for schoolchildren long after they leave school and become professionals, and long after the technologies that excited and motivated them in school become obsolete.

The Behind the Screen project will hopefully create a huge, rich, free and open technology resource that all schools should be able to benefit from at zero cost. Such resources will need to be constantly refreshed to keep up with the ever changing digital technology we keep on inventing, and teachers will need ongoing support themselves to keep on top of those ever changing new resources. These are big challenges and their solution will need the continual support of the computing profession.

The invention of digital computers and programming languages means we have finally figured out how to get machines to do practically anything we want just by giving them written instructions. Before computers, each task you wanted doing meant either doing it yourself or building a physical machine for exactly that one task, and it was useless for anything else. We can now program a machine to do quantum physics, to synthesise medicines, to fly an aircraft, or even to help people communicate with other people online. The invention of computers is a leap forward for the human race that is surely as important as the invention of writing.

Children need to be excited and drawn in by these kinds of pioneering examples which hopefully is what Behind the Screen will achieve. At the same time young people need to learn the knowledge necessary to become technology pioneers themselves one day.

We also need government to give clear signals to schools that computing is important by allowing it as an option within the national curriculum. If not then league table pressures will mean school heads won’t believe this is a subject they need to support. Unless the government also makes sure that the new computing curriculum is defined in terms of rigorous computing principles, then in five years from now we can expect another lecture about our mistakes from someone of the status of Eric Schmidt. Perhaps next time Mark Zuckerberg would be interested in explaining where it all went wrong, should that be necessary.

^[1] Computing at School website

^[2] UK Office of National Statistics Report: e-Commerce & ICT Activity 2009

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