Anyone requested that their (state) secondary start offering a GCSE?

Oh, and I also think your claim that state schools are of the opinion that all students are of equal intelligence and should be taught the same thing is bollocks.

I haven't said it can't be done, just that your suggestion that schools just hire a bunch of teachers in order to teach it was silly. You also keep going on about academies as if they are the solution. My school is an academy yet has no money.

Michael Gove has already announced the scrapping of the curriculum for ICT at the recent BECTA conference so I expect schools will be looking at their provision now anyway.

Yes, VC of a secondary and Chair of Finance.

The problem doesn't lie in not envisioning a change but in application very soon. 80% of budgets will be staffing costs and you can't just conjure up programmers. For schools with one (we've got one as it happens) then things can be done but if you don't have a staff member who can teach this and it's not the sort of thing they can learn in a short course, then you can only plan ahead because the resources just aren't there to suddenly bring something new into the curriculum.

On an earlier post, I did say to ask. Schools need to know and it may be on their radar too. However, a change in the short term is unlikely to be possible unless there are staff changes coming up or it was on their strategic improvement list already.

I would recommend you become a parent Governor, join finance and curriculum and see exactly how easy all of this really is.

If you want to ensure senior leadership implements a new strategy like this and fast, I recommend you push Ofsted to include it on its criteria! It will be the only way to create magic in an environment with costs so immensely squeezed, you cannot believe (but you will when you become a Governor!)

Actually, LittenTree, I've just got out ds's Options Booklet for GCSEs, and there is something called CIDA (Certificate in Digital Applications - one GCSE) which is "only suitable for pupils who are highly motivated, capable of independent work and are seriously committed to using ICT".

There is a National Certificate in ICT which is only "for a few pupils by invitation" - which is a fancy way of saying it's for the less able.

hth

State schools that follow the national curriculum still manage to offer vocational qualifications and college placements to less academically inclined students and extra GCSEs to the most able. You certainly don't need to be an academy to do this.

And you still don't seem to get the point that the hiring of new teachers doesn't depend on whether a parent fancies their DC having a go at a particular course but on how much money the school has sloshing around. And believe me it's in short supply. If there are no teachers capable of teaching it and the school can't afford it then it won't be offered. And that is nothing to do with ideology, simply economics.

If the course is then compulsory, then you could well end up with people who aren't really qualified to teach it giving it a go.

Ofsted would have a field day with any comp that taught all its students the same curriculum. It just doesn't happen. Vocational qualifications, college placements for the less academic and extra GCSEs for the top end are fairly standard.

"I also despair of that stupid, state-school English attitude of 'all DC are of equal intelligence and thus must be taught exactly the same curriculum regardless of whether they have the skills to master half of it'."

Which stupid state schools would these be? I doubt whether you would find many state schools which didn't put children in sets, and didn't 'differeniate' within sets.

"The fact you find my remark that 'girls at a secondary modern learned to type' patronising is laughable, it really is. They were being taught skills appropriate to their likely future employment prospects. No one was pretending they'd pass a 'O' level physics, otherwise they'd've been at the grammar school, wouldn't they?"

The eleven plus was notorious for setting a higher pass mark for girls than boys, because girls did better than boys at eleven, consigning a number of able girls to the secondary modern who would easily have got to the grammar school if a boy.

By the same token, a fair number of the pupils in the top sets at a secondary modern would have been perfectly capable of getting an O level in physics if they had been prepared for it. But no, they were educated to know their place, so offered typing for girls, woodwork for boys. You make it sound as though you would be happy with this.

LittenTree - I agree with all you say re differentiation.

On your original point, T offer something called Systems Control at GCSE. I gather this is about the insides ?????? of a computer as opposed to just the mouse manipulation of IT. Clearly I'm no expert and ds is not very computery, but ds's friend who is a mega-brain is taking Systems Control and I doubt whether he would opt for a wishy-washy subject.

Littentree, Balia is correct, there is no money in state schools to go out hiring some teachers just to teach computing. This government has slashed school budgets so schools are laying teachers off, not hiring.

Your assumption that schools found money to hire PSHE teachers because it became compulsory shows how out of touch you are with reality. Most schools did not hire PSHE teachers, they simply timetabled current teachers to teach it. All full time teachers in my school have to teach it despite having no training to do so. If you want computing taught what will happen is that some ICT teacher will be told that they need to learn the syllabus because that's what they're teaching now.

Hire a teacher just to teach computing GCSE. What would they do with the rest of their time?

It's not refusal to differentiate or liberalism, it's severe lack of funding and resources.

My son is learning scratch and JavaScript. He keeps sending stuff to school so he is learning it with a teacher of some sort. I had assumed it was IT. He is in year 9. I have no idea how it works or if they are just at 'playing' level. It sounds like a game as he was talking about trying to sort a 'glitch with his character'.

I would ask the school - after all how else will they know - but don't hold out hopes. Budgets are very tight and I would imagine schools are finding it difficult t offer the options that they used to, needing now to fill th classes of the traditional subjects, rather than think about offering extras.

Odd how computing never took off isn't it? I did computer studies AO level back in 1981 ... taught by a maths teacher whose hubby worked as a programmer! There was one PC in the whole school at that stage ... locked in a room. I didn't know that a GCSE existed, because at the DCs school they offer computing AS as a 2 year course for "selected" pupils.

Draft in new teachers? Is that some kind of nerdy IT joke? Are you going to offer to pay for it? Because school budgets are being slashed, teachers pay is frozen, EMAs are scrapped...

Perhaps you should volunteer to go into teaching, OP, I'm sure 'the less able' would love to have the benefit of your patronising attitude experience.

On the Today programme this morning they had an item about people learning "programming"
but it was only HTML, CSS and Java
whereas to my mind programming is C++ or the good old days of basic

most IT staff cannot programme for toffee
let the kids loose on this : scratch.mit.edu/
EXCELLENT skill building

I'd much prefer that dd was taught maths really well and learnt to code in her own time!

One point - I learnt typing at school in the 1980s, they encouraged everyone to learn to type, regardless of how academic you were.

I'd say that being able to touch type both very fast and accurately has been one of the most useful skills that I learnt at school. Which goes to show how little you can predict the future (I don't suppose my teachers envisaged the fact that it would be useful to be able to take accurate meeting notes directly onto a laptop, for example.)

The maths department is too busy teaching maths to teach computer science. Also, we are mathematicians, not programmers.

I would add as I said previously that as I have not had to use my learning in this field for years, I would have to re-learn what I covered in my qualifications, but also learn the new languages as I have never had to use them prior to even thinking about teaching it

I'll try to write with correct English (New phone!)

Just to give you an example of the experience of some ICT teachers....

My actual degree is Business and ICT Education which qualifies my fellow graduates and I to teach ICT which is based using ICT. I however also hold an HNC in Electronics which was heavily based in machine code programming and the basics behind the design of computers - this is very unusual and a different field entirely