Royal Society reveals details of investigation into IT education

The Royal Society is conducting an investigation into why schools are putting off IT

The Royal Society has called for businesses to offer evidence for its investigation into the problem with IT education in schools.

The group began its investigation this month and is expecting to complete it by November 2011.

“We’ve had our first meeting with our advisory group and drawn up the questions we think are interesting,” explained Dr Martin Smith from the Royal Society.

The advisory group comprises a wide group of organisations with similar concerns about the standard of IT education in the UK.

“From this, we’ve produced a call for evidence; a set of questions for businesses and individuals to provide answers to. The first stage is to send these questions out as widely as possible to interested organisations and individuals to see what evidence exists and what their opinions are. That will shape what we do with the rest of the project,” he said.

With numbers of young people studying ICT and computer science at GCSE and A-Level falling consistently, students are instead being attracted to taking up apprenticeships with employers. BT recently said that it saw unprecedented interest in its apprenticeship scheme this year and IBM has also launched its own apprenticeship scheme in the UK.

Smith said that this trend could mean that students that are being encouraged to study subjects at GCSE and A-Level – and then take it further to degree level - are being given the wrong advice when it comes to IT education. Employment schemes could in fact suit them better.

“In reality, employers aren’t seeing GCSE and A-Level IT as a good thing to study, so are students being given the right advice?” he said.

“It’s entirely all right for the number of students studying IT A-levels to drop so long as the number pursuing IT qualifications in another way, such as with an employer, is increasing.”

He added that the Royal Society is predominantly concerned about the economic effect of schools putting young people off IT.

Smith also revealed that an idea currently being explored would see IT dropped from the curriculum as a subject in its own right, and instead integrated more extensively across all other subjects.

“I think that’s something we are going to be looking at. There’s anecdotal evidence that IT at GCSE level isn’t fit for purpose and we’re looking at and considering whether to recommend changes be made.”

“I can’t say what’s going to happen yet because we’re still a while away from reaching that stage, but it’s exactly questions like that that we’re interested in.”