Year of Code is a 'vapid PR exercise with no thought whatsoever', says resigned board member Mulqueeny

Organisers 'sidelined everyone' and 'borrowed brand kudos' while leaving experts out of the light, says Young Rewired State founder

An ex-board member of the government's "Year of Code" initiative has branded the Gove and Osborne-fronted campaign "a vapid PR exercise with no thought whatsoever", complaining that Year of Code has been constructed purely to court the media, while sidelining the experts who contributed advice on developing it.

Speaking exclusively to Computing following her recent blog on her resignation from Year of Code, Emma Mulqueeny – who founded global youth coding network Young Rewired State – says she feels her input and that of other consultants has been left out of the final mix.

"It was not just Young Rewired State that I felt was sidelined," said Mulqueeny.

"The reason I finally decided to throw in the towel was because so many of my colleagues and compatriots who have spent years in this space working hard and often voluntarily were not included."

The "final straw", said Mulqueeny, was when the lead of the Computing at Schools (CAS) organisation contacted her, as a Year of Code board member, to complain about their own lack of consultation over Year of Code.

Composed of teachers and industry experts, and overseen by the British Computer Society – the chartered institute for IT that is also responsible for recruiting "Master Teachers" to train existing educators, among other roles in the new curriculum – the CAS is supposed to be a fundamental player in government IT education initiatives.

"I just felt that my position was untenable when people were coming to me as I was publicly listed as an adviser, but yet had absolutely no influence and no idea what was going on," said Mulqueeny.

Mulqueeny also believes that Year of Code is guilty of having "borrowed brand kudos from established places like [Young Rewired State] and Coder Dojo and then went out and sold their empty briefcase on the back of a wave of ill-informed (literally) PR".

Speaking about Year of Crode frontperson Lottie Dexter, Mulqueeny told Computing that the campaign's organisers informed her that Dexter – who recently appeared on BBC's Newsnight and admitted to host Jeremy Paxman that she did not know how to code – was "a lovely, enthusiastic girl with a bundle of energy".

"I think they were hoping to have her as a female tech inspiration," said Mulqueeny.

"Unfortunately while she is female and beautiful, she is not technical and was very badly briefed, if briefed at all. I think it is a vapid PR exercise with no thought whatsoever. Or, if you go down the conspiracy route, a way to make this whole coding nonsense go away – as it is going to really rip the seams of education."

On her blog, Mulqueeny voiced concerns that a deliberately bungled PR campaign could see the student coding debate "kicked into the long grass" by a government that may be less interested in its success than promotional videos featuring the likes of George Osbourne may let on.

The problems with getting children to code, she told Computing, are more complex than Year of Code can hope to solve.

"The coding lobby movement has been growing and will not go away," said Mulqueeny.

Year of Code is a 'vapid PR exercise with no thought whatsoever', says resigned board member Mulqueeny

Organisers 'sidelined everyone' and 'borrowed brand kudos' while leaving experts out of the light, says Young Rewired State founder

"To my mind it is a tricky one for government to solve, because in order to teach the necessary skills they are going to have to either train up a whole new load of teachers, and pay them extremely well if they want to attract the technical talent (this will take about 10 years; no one has 10 years), or they are going to have to embrace the flipped classroom: children learning outside the classroom then sharing what they know with the class through peer-to-peer, curated by the teacher."

Mulqueeny warned that embracing such a practice for learning environments "does not stop at computing", and will require a greater commitment from the government in terms of potentially overhauling the entire schooling process.

Mulqueeny believes that the £500,000 the government is laying out is "a ridiculous sum".

"How on earth is that going to train all the teachers to teach programming by September? Someone did the maths and I think it works out at about 40p a school," she told Computing.

"To be honest, the exam boards are writing GCSEs and A Levels that include computing, so teachers will learn how to teach that anyway, the same way they do now. The junior school teachers need to learn how to teach computational thinking. The government needs to either pay a lot of money to a lot of technical people to teach in schools and clubs, or they need to have a well-structured methodology of bridging the decade it will take to train up an army of programming teachers – this will need to include flipped classrooms, learning online using the tools already freely available."

Mulqueeny's blog also mentioned that she does not even agree with the government initiative to enforce mandatory teaching of the mechanics of coding to seven-year-olds.

"Teaching computational thinking should be mandatory, because I believe all children should have an understanding of the digital world – how it works," said Mulqueeny.

"They need to be given the elements to write with as well as read and consume coded products. Then they should be offered it as a course in senior school to explore if they so desire. Making coding mandatory is unnecessary."

But Mulqueeny does believe that "computational thinking" is essential.

"I have changed my mind on this," she told Computing. "Years ago I petitioned government to teach our kids to code. But through the last six years of Young Rewired State, I have discovered children who are super-genius, poly-codal talents, and the enthusiasts (more of the latter, I have to say) and I have met those who have tried it, don't like it and have no interest whatsoever. If those who have no interest whatsoever are mandated to do it, they will destroy it for those who do, and it will hold back the exact people we need to free up to push at the edges of what is possible, to test those innovation boundaries.

"Just so long as they have been taught computational thinking and basic digital literacy in junior school – that's fine."