UK IT Curriculum Petition - UK Escapists Please Read

[jprf]

As anyone who has recently been through the UK education system can tell you, our IT education is terrible. You get taught to use a few programs (office mostly) and effectively nothing else. What isn't on the curriculum is programming of any kind, which I feel is a huge oversight (Google chairman Eric Schmidt agrees with me: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education). Creating programs is a huge part of modern business and industry and to have no instruction in it at all can only be detrimental to our competitiveness.

For this reason, I've set up a petition to the government here: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/15218 to get programming added to the curriculum as a compulsory part of IT.

As many will know, getting 100,000 signatures on a petition guarantees a debate in Parliament on the subject, so that is a good target.
Please sign it and do what you can to spread it around if you feel strongly about this.
I have no idea if non-UK residents can sign it, but they probably don't care anyway.

Edit: Let me be a little more specific- I don't mean anything advanced and I don't mean making it a compulsory subject on it's own. What I mean is that at some point in the already compulsory IT lessons there should be an introduction to programming to get people interested and to give them the skills needed to pursue it in their own time.

 

[Calcium]

We did a bit of Prolog and Visual Basic in my school; introducing us to procedural and declarative programming. Though my school is in Scotland. By UK do you mean UK or England?

 

[i7omahawki]

Why does it need to be compulsory?

Programming seems like a specialist skill to me, and there doesn't seem to be much reward in learning it if you aren't going to pursue programming.

Also, I know very little about it, but it seems more complicated that microsoft office, which I know a large section of my school struggled to use.

It should definitely be available in schools, but compulsory...I'm not so sure.

 

[Esotera]

I think it'd be better that programming wasn't taught in schools, or at least any serious form of programming. Most teachers won't have a clue what to do, and it'll end up with students falling into very bad habits.

Programming has always been something that if you want to get good at, you just practice and practice by yourself.

 

[Zaphod65]

I'm currently doing a Comp Sci degree and the tutors here have said they don't even like having A-level students that much because teachers more often than not teach them to code but not the more fundamental skills like problem solving and so on. Teaching programming at any level lower than A-level sounds like a pretty damn bad idea to me, at least right now.

 

[StANDY1338]

I don't plan to use code at any point in the future. I don't know anyone who plans to really.

I think it would be a bit of a waste of time. Maby general problem solving skills but not coding.

 

[mrF00bar]

I came out of school a little while ago and while I did not take IT my best mate did, he passed but because the IT department is so badly looked after he didn't have a real teacher for almost all of his course, at one point one of the supply teachers lost everyones course work, all of it and he had to redo it all right near the end of the year. Only 6 out of the class got a pass because so much work was lost.

 

[evilgenius134]

Standard computer function is all that is required for any individual. Forcing programming, which is fairly complicated to be taught at a non-university level, takes the focus away from learning material which is useful to the individual.

University courses will begin from the start for programming as A-Level computing cannot teach programming the way they wish it to be taught, correctly, programming is taught to pass the exam and only students with a keen interest in programming will even get close to proper programming procedures.

our IT education is terrible.

No, our teaching system of IT is bad, schools not putting it to the same standard as other subjects, students regarded IT lessons as time to mess around on the internet, teachers being incredibly inept at dealing with such a different lesson format and insufficient programs to lock computers/software down for students not using the computers for the required material.

The ECDL, Microsoft Office curriculum is a standard for almost every job today and ensuring that just that is taught correctly and properly is key, laying on programming is a useless addition that will detract lessons from students who do not wish to partake in a programming career or a career that has no focus on computers.

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

I dont mean to be one of these whiney Scots (and that would only be half true anyway as im English but live in Scotland) that moan when you say the UK instead of just England but 1/3rd of my standard grade and higher courses at high school were programming, so apparantly its just England that sucks (although tbh overall Scotlands schools are consistantly rated as much poorer than the UK average)

 

[Brandon237]

Why does it need to be compulsory?

Programming seems like a specialist skill to me, and there doesn't seem to be much reward in learning it if you aren't going to pursue programming.

Also, I know very little about it, but it seems more complicated that microsoft office, which I know a large section of my school struggled to use.

It should definitely be available in schools, but compulsory...I'm not so sure.

We, here in South Africa (third-world-otopia) have IT and CAT, Information Technology and Computer Applications Technology.
Cat is what the OP has for IT, and in our IT you do mostly programming (in Delphi, we use Turbo Delphi) with some technology discussion and learning (clusters on a hard-drive, how a network functions, web-browsing etc.) and the entire CAT syllabus condensed where we do all of office as fast as possible to get back to "proper" IT.

I support this petition fully, maybe just separate the subjects as we do here, where IT is high-level (have to take full maths and pass an entrance exam) where as CAT is the low-level subject.

And the whole programming mindset is VERY useful, it has helped my maths tremendously and got me into other things like better image editing and other tangential things. It is my favourite subject.

Your school struggled with MS-O??? ?

 

[ipop@you]

Well I'm currently just over half-way through a GCSE IT course and we really don't do much else other than use office programs. In the past for some projects we've done we've been given a few very basic instructions in html with the simplest commands.

I do, however, know that at A level you can take IT which is more of the same or you can take Computing which is a course that teaches more aspects of programming but I don't know how much. I'm thinking about taking it but I'm wavering between a few for my last subject.

 

[Kayevcee]

We learned (I say learned... we had the whole year to write three programs, and when I couldn't compare with the guy next to me I would ask the teacher what to do next, then move on to the next line and ask again) Pascal when I was at school. I've never seen nor heard of Pascal being used for anything, ever. I'd have preferred to learn HTML or java or something that might have actually been useful in our lives outside the classroom.

I agree with what others have said that programming is a biiig subject that is better covered at university level. Still, enough html to put a basic website together would at least be useful.

-Nick

 

[Illessa]

Why does it need to be compulsory?

Programming seems like a specialist skill to me, and there doesn't seem to be much reward in learning it if you aren't going to pursue programming.

Also, I know very little about it, but it seems more complicated that microsoft office, which I know a large section of my school struggled to use.

It should definitely be available in schools, but compulsory...I'm not so sure.

You could say the same thing about at least subsections of any subject beyond basic three Rs. Personally I would have really benefited from being doing a programming course at school - I did physics at university and was having a miserable time until I did a module of C++ and adored it. Instead of plodding my way through to the inevitable crappy third, I jumped departments and now have a good CS degree and a developer job that I really enjoy (most of the time). If I'd been exposed to programming at school I probably wouldn't have wasted 2 years of my life.

It's also way more practical than you might expect, sure you're unlikely to create anything spectacular if you're not going to pursue it beyond the basics, but learn the basics, preferably along with some basic hardware and OS stuff (seriously, a lot of what your average IT dept/tech support do is really simple, you just need to understand what the components do and how to mess around troubleshooting), and there's any number of tasks you can get done in a fraction of the time. The number of times I see people tortuously going through really inane manual tasks whilst editing text documents, moving files around, whatever, that could be accomplished with 5 minutes and half a dozen lines of python or something is painful.

 

[devotedsniper]

Unless your going down the programming career like me you don't need to be taught it, it takes years to code programs which actually do anything useful, after a year at university the most useful thing i've made was for an assignment which was creating a prisoner list, telling the user what prisoner was in what cell block, along with various other features and even that didn't have a gui it was all through command prompt.

If you want to go down the programming route do what i did don't go to sixth form, go to college on an IT course, hell mine only had 2 programming modules but it got me into my computing science degree easily (well i originally got onto software engineering but changed over), and thats because they teach you from the start and train you in the proper format, and with the latest and best (sometimes the older way is taught because it works so well) ways.

And if you think that process isn't a very good way then let me put it to you this way, at Staffordshire University out of the programmers (and there aren't that many of us about 100 if even that), when it comes to placement year, 2 sometimes more go to CERN (and they only take 250 placement students from the whole of europe) and god knows how many people go to big companys such as CISCO, HP, IBM, the list goes on. Point is university and college is where your programming career really starts.

 

[omega 616]

snip

A better use of time would be a life skills class, teaching you how to iron, change the oil and tyres on a car and how to check levels, how to start up direct debits and budgeting.

You probably like programming, which is cool, I don't. I have no interest in programming to any degree, so why should I be forced to learn something I will never use? It just forces me to research and study something I will never put to any use, I would have to do homework on it as well.

By "I" I mean every kid like me, I wish I was back at school ... the simpler times ...

Say you wanted a job as a mechanic, how would knowing how to programme help you? It wouldn't, it would take away from more important subjects like maths and English, which are both used constantly from working out how much time you need to do something to applying for jobs.

Programming is a specialized job that not everybody needs to know how to do.

 

[i7omahawki]

Why does it need to be compulsory?

We, here in South Africa (third-world-otopia) have IT and CAT, Information Technology and Computer Applications Technology.
Cat is what the OP has for IT, and in our IT you do mostly programming (in Delphi, we use Turbo Delphi) with some technology discussion and learning (clusters on a hard-drive, how a network functions, web-browsing etc.) and the entire CAT syllabus condensed where we do all of office as fast as possible to get back to "proper" IT.

I support this petition fully, maybe just separate the subjects as we do here, where IT is high-level (have to take full maths and pass an entrance exam) where as CAT is the low-level subject.

And the whole programming mindset is VERY useful, it has helped my maths tremendously and got me into other things like better image editing and other tangential things. It is my favourite subject.

Your school struggled with MS-O??? ?

Students in my school struggled with Microsoft Office yes.

I agree that it should be available to those capable and willing, it was the compulsory element (unless that refers to schools having to provide it rather than all students having to study it) that concerned me.

 

[Brandon237]

Why does it need to be compulsory?

We, here in South Africa (third-world-otopia) have IT and CAT, Information Technology and Computer Applications Technology.
Cat is what the OP has for IT, and in our IT you do mostly programming (in Delphi, we use Turbo Delphi) with some technology discussion and learning (clusters on a hard-drive, how a network functions, web-browsing etc.) and the entire CAT syllabus condensed where we do all of office as fast as possible to get back to "proper" IT.

I support this petition fully, maybe just separate the subjects as we do here, where IT is high-level (have to take full maths and pass an entrance exam) where as CAT is the low-level subject.

And the whole programming mindset is VERY useful, it has helped my maths tremendously and got me into other things like better image editing and other tangential things. It is my favourite subject.

Your school struggled with MS-O??? ?

Students in my school struggled with Microsoft Office yes.

I agree that it should be available to those capable and willing, it was the compulsory element (unless that refers to schools having to provide it rather than all students having to study it) that concerned me.

That... is quite bad I doubt that someone who struggles at MS-O has the greatest future prospects.

Aah, I interpreted the OP as saying that it had to be provided, which I think it should, it is a very good subject. And while it may be a specialised subjects, it is always there for you to use and expand on, and can make any career in which a PC is used that much easier if you apply the programming.

 

[LoFr3Eq]

I agree with the guy that said that students should be taught to solve problems before jumping into programming and 'magic spells' that my old professor lectured about. Maybe even a rudimentary lesson on objects could suffice for programming education.

My school taught that kinda stuff, I didn't take those courses though, and I'm a software developer now. Learning office is probably more important today anyway.

 

[Da_Vane]

IT is basic computer use, so the curriculum covers it quite well. It is basically Office and stuff. In most schools, programming and such comes in at sixth form, although certain technical schools offer programming courses earlier, as part of the range of options when choosing which secondary school to go to.