Schools face a computing crisis

Less than half the schools in England are running GCSE Computing courses, according to research.

After the Reboot report paints a bleak picture of computing education in schools, showing the subject is underfunded, not entirely relevant and unable to attract teachers who are equipped to teach the curriculum.

The situation is bleak in England in particular, which “meets only 68% of its computing teacher recruitment targets and where, as a result, one in two schools don’t offer Computer Science at GCSE, a crucial stage of young people’s education,” said Steve Furber, ARM processor pioneer and a fellow of the Society.

Across England, 54% of schools don’t offer Computer Science GCSE courses, while more than a third of pupils are at schools that don’t provide the course.

The Royal Society report – the first since a major overhaul in school computing tuition in 2014 – says the government must invest £60 million in teachers to bring computing up to a par with maths or physics.

The system needs an additional 8,000 qualified teachers, yet not a single Teacher Subject Specialism Training (TSST) course was available for those who wanted to become computing teachers, while 65 such courses existed for physics and 95 for maths.

Currently, the government allocates only £1.2 million a year to training existing teachers to move into computing.

No incentive to retrain

Other academics agreed with the research, with one former teacher pointing out that, given the wages, pressure and working hours of teachers, many potential applicants would prefer to stay in industry. “It’s well known teachers are under a lot of pressure, have to work long hours and take work home,” said

ABOVE 54% of schools in England don’t offer Computer Science GCSE courses

Huw Davis, a former teacher and researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.

“I just don’t see any incentives for IT professionals to go into classrooms – especially in challenging schools where they are needed most.”

The report also criticised the new curriculum, which teachers have claimed was pushed on them without any serious consultation or training. “If you read the specification for GCSE Computer Science, you can see it’s esoteric and difficult to translate into exciting lessons,” explained Davies, adding that a focus on programme documentation and debugging were encouraging neither children or teachers into the subject.

“It’s difficult to see how GCSE Computer Science, as it is, will achieve broad appeal,” he said.