ICT in Schools

Michael Gove today announced the ‘scraping’ of ICT in schools for it to be replaced with a IT curriculum rich in computer sciences. He is right to label current the ICT curriculum boring, after all that that is one of many reasons I gave up teaching. If I did not enjoy or see the relevance of what I was expected to teach, how could the kids I was teaching? I fear that what will replace ICT will prove to be as equally boring if not more, appeal to only a small majority of youngsters and disengage girls from the technology.

ICT has always been about having the understanding of and the capability to use technology available to us. Some of the problem in schools has been that:

a.     Teachers from other subjects have been used to fill in ‘timetable holes’ at Key Stage 3. Many of have been happy to be users of ICT within the comfort zone of their own subject areas but have struggled to deliver discreet ICT lessons. Support for these teachers has been inadequate. The bottom line being: if the teacher is not enjoying teaching the lesson how can you expect the children to?

b.      ICT has become just another subject to be studied, assessed and reported, so rigid confines have been set. To me IT has always been a material to be worked with hardware and software being the tools to work that material. ICT is about having the skills and capability to work this material; it is a practical discipline, you have to be creative with it and when allowed to treat it as such the results children achievements can be surprising, exciting for all and real leaning takes place. ICT is constantly changing but there has been little flexibility within National Strategy and examination specifications to enable exploration of new uses of this material.

My fear that if we move to scrap ICT, introducing computer science and coding there will be very little creativity. We will produce computer technicians and not computer users.

I have no problem with cross curricular ICT, I have been an advocate of that for over 20 years and it was a part of my role as an Advisory teacher to instigate whole school ICT auditing. It should continue and be strengthened.

The problem with cross-curricular delivery of ICT it that is a user of the technology;  e.g. a science teacher wants only to be able to use a spread sheet to model an experiment, they are not interested in teaching the skills and understanding needed to create the spread sheet. Discreet IT should deliver the capabilities that can be used by other subjects. It should also give a holistic picture of ICT and the nature of data; that data is able to move between applications and it your understanding of generic software applications enables you to derive the information you require from that data. It should also have the freedom to explore new technology and allow some creativity and fun. These ICT lessons should be taken by ICT specialists.

I am a great believer that if the teacher is having fun teaching and the children are having fun good learning takes place. If the teacher is not having fun but the kids are they are having fun at the teachers expense and no learning is taking place. Sadly many of the later lessons were the ICT lessons taken by other subject specialist out of their comfort zone.

As for teaching of coding, children should be aware of it, understand the importance of code and undertake some practical tasks to demonstrate how it works but not learn programing. Our nation’s workforce needs everyone to be able to successfully drive the technology; we do not need everyone to be skilled at working ‘under the bonnet’ only understand what happens there. What is highly important is that those that do work ‘under the bonnet’ should very highly skilled. Acquiring those skills is a role for vocational education but there lies another discussion.