IT education remains mired in uncertainty

The Department for Education’s recent response to the James Review into capital investment in state education has sparked a heated debate about how computing should be taught and used in schools. Many educationalists and members of the IT industry are angry because the DfE’s response completely omitted mention of the benefits of broadband to schools, or ICT/computing teaching in the classroom, despite both being highlighted in the original review.

Advocates of computing and ICT in education from business, schools and the third sector have subsequently increased collaboration in a bid to bring the subject back onto the government’s agenda.

At a Westminster eForum event, entitled The Future of Technology in Education, Bernadette Brooks, general manager of the National Association of Advisors for Computers in Education (NAACE) urged delegates to contribute to a white paper on the subject, due for release in December. The aim of the white paper is to collate key pieces of advice around technology best practice, standards and platforms for use in schools.

So what are the big issues for those involved in IT and education, and how should these be addressed?

Dr Peter Twining, director of Vital, a body partially funded by the DfE that aims to support the teaching of ICT and computing, told delegates at the Westminster eForum event that there are not enough teachers capable of teaching computing.

“Computing is the discipline, IT is the subject and ICT describes the practice of embedding technology in teaching and using it across the curriculum,” he said.

“The problem with the discipline of computing is that we don’t have sufficient teachers. It is difficult to retain them when the IT industry is so well salaried.”

He went on to explain that embedding ICT in the curriculum also raised significant problems: “Using technology to teach changes the nature of the questions asked around a subject, and it also changes the [practice of teaching] more generally.”

There are also limits to schools’ ability to assess IT skills, he said.

“The problem is that there is currently no way of assessing 21st century skills such as collaboration using social media, or an ability to use and manipulate databases, you just can’t know how advanced someone is in these areas.”

Neil Hopkin, executive headteacher of the Rosendale and Christ Church primary schools in West Dulwich and Brixton, picked up on this point and warned that “what is not assessed is ignored”. Without the measurement tools in place, he argued, schools would not embed ICT into the curriculum.

“Without this assessment, in three to five years we will have fallen a long way behind our global competitors, it will be a disaster,” he said.

Hopkin appeared to be promoting ICT above the discipline of computing, and explained that the creation of blogs to write up science reports, and the use of other web 2.0 technologies to share information, helped develop skills that would be required from the workforce of the future.

However, professor Simon Peyton-Jones disagreed and said schools should focus on computing not ICT. He argued that teaching the fundamentals, rather than just how to use spreadsheets, databases and the web, was as vital as the teaching of other sciences.

“Children are taught physics and biology because we live in a physical and biological world. We now live in a digital world and children should be taught how it works. This will allow them to manipulate computers for their own ends,” Peyton-Jones said.

He conceded that there had recently been some movement in this direction, with the examination body OCR having just launched a computing GCSE.

However, Twining said that he did not think Hopkin’s and Peyton-Jones’ views differed that much and that their apparent disagreement demonstrated the fact that the curriculum in this area was still unformed.

All concurred that a common approach to the issue was needed, and that the best way to achieve this was through stakeholder and industry collaboration.

Andy Palmer, director of education and skills at BT, said: “We recruit 750 people from schools per annum, and we and companies like us therefore need to be involved in the debate about technology and teaching. Our staff need to be both generators of and advanced users of technology.”

And perhaps the government is not as blind to the issue as it might at first appear. It is true that the government’s response to the James Review was lacking the detail expected by some, and that the government scrapped technology in education body Becta in May last year; but the part of the DfE responsible for science, technology, engineering and maths recently provided £2.5m for the teaching of ICT within schools. And with the plethora of bodies lobbying in this area, including NAACE, Computing at School and the BCS, and the teachers and industry bellowing discontent from the rooftops, the government might yet be forced to take a lead on the issue.