Training computer science teachers (UK)

by jrwestgarth

In April 2013 the British Government announced it would provide £2 million to create 16,000 computer teachers (ed: £125 per teacher?). The BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) – formerly the British Computer Society – is charged with delivering the program. In real terms this program looks like £1 million a year over two years to train 400 ‘master teachers’ in computer science, most likely through the BCS Academy of Computing.  Each of these teachers is then expected to train up to 40 schools (hence 16,000 teachers).

The program builds on the BCS/Computing at School’s existing Network of Excellence, an initiative to connect university educators with school teachers and support ongoing teacher professional development.  As of September 2012 approximately 570 schools had registered for the program – by May 2014 is was about 1000.

Thoughts:

Sounds great. The UK Government computer teacher funding initiatives are a response to their changes to the national curriculum. Makes sense that if you are going to change the curriculum you’d need a concerted effort to retrain teachers. My questions would be around the declining numbers of teachers pursuing computer science as a discipline – can the UK find 400 master teachers? This article (Reboot ICT teacher training to halt the computing brain drain, David Grover, May 2014) painted a fairly grim picture of the projected computer science teacher pipeline here in Australia.