On the UK’s Digital Curriculum

Are teachers ready for the coding revolution? (BBC News, January 2014) is an article about the changes to the English digital technologies curriculum. However the article is not the most interesting part of this post – as always – the money is in the comments section. I did a quick read of about 100 of the comments (of 240) and have pulled together a summary below. For the most part the comments were negative, criticising the UK government’s ability to roll out an education program, questioning its necessity, questioning teachers capability in delivering the curriculum, debating England’s role in the global technology value chain…

Here’s the summary:

On teachers:

The comments focused on teachers not having the skills or confidence to deliver programming in the classroom. Some thought that a poorly taught subject would do more harm than good – further discouraging people from pursuing technology as a career path or skills set. They suggested that teachers are already overworked and don’t have time to master a new set of tools (such as Scratch). The point was raised that students would rapidly overtake their teachers and the teachers would be left struggling without support.

On programming as part of the curriculum:

These comments asked why should programming be taught in primary school – they suggested primary school was for reading, writing, science, sports, socialisation. Teaching programming would create a generation of anti-social nerds. They suggested that there is a myth that a) programming is necessary to be in the tech space and b) coding is being oversold as an economic solution – that in reality it is a boring, frustrating, tedious process. Others argued that teaching coding languages was pointless however there was some benefit to teaching computational thinking and logic. Another point said that what really needs to be taught is entrepreneurship and business skills – then the students would learn to apply their tech knowledge through doing. And the ever present – why do I need to learn to code if I am not planning on working in technology?

On the economy:

There was a lot of discussion about whether anyone actually needs coding skills in 21st century England. That this is a skills set that should be outsourced to cheaper locations in the world (specifically mentioning India and Eastern Europe). Some commented that there were already enough skilled workers in England but that employers were looking for cheap labour overseas so talent was left languishing in unemployment queues. Others said that salaries were too low to attract high quality students into those careers. Another comment was that you don’t actually spend time coding if you are working in tech.

On the Government’s plans:

High levels of cynicism that the program would be over promised and under delivered, leaving teachers high and dry without resources.

My thoughts:

Tough crowd. However the comments do raise interesting points for any government looking to tackle technology in the curriculum. The biggest question I saw was about whether every student needs to learn to code? The typical answer is ‘not really’ – not everyone is going to head into the tech space. A more nuanced answer is ‘yes’, because students need to be exposed to this line of thinking – alongside the traditional maths, writing, science – so that they are not locked out of future job prospects. A key difference between the the 1980s (the last time governments had a tech push) and now is the omni presence of technology in our lives. Technology is no longer a nerd thing, everyone is using a smartphone and doing business/life over the internet. You don’t have to have a career in this space but you do need to know how it works.

The question of employability has been raised before. How can we say we are experiencing a STEM crisis if there is currently a skilled pool of programmers unable to find jobs (be it the US, Australia or the UK). At the moment the only answer I have found is that this relates to whether these candidates have continued to develop their skills/certificates and also do they have the soft skills and diverse backgrounds needed for the roles – but this needs more research and insight.

Either way, the above comments give an indication of the types of questions a government would need to address before rolling out a program of this nature.