Woah there - let's not write off the CS department of every UK institution, shall we? This is definitely a case of 'YMMV'.
and a little like hub networking we can only operate at the rate of the slowest peer. We can't "negotiate up" the curriculum.
so it's a waste of time and resources for many people. - like another poster said though there is a lot of mathematics involved so it's not like I'm saying it's useless, just that it's certainly not necessary and that we should be (and are) putting computers into the hands of children rather than teaching people -only once they arrive at university- about how computers function.
I don't know about the rest of the UK but Computing Science is on the curriculum at schools in Scotland - I studied computing at school in the early 80s and had projects doing 6502 assembler on an Apple (NB and I did not go to a fancy school).
Here is a SQA Advanced Higher paper - looks pretty good to me:
for the last 10 years there hasn't been. (even at college level)
the closest that comes near is the BTEC National Diploma in IT systems support (which I took) which teaches you the OSI model and how to crimp cables. (and also that Worms are "bad" and viruses are also "bad" and hackers are "bad" etcetc)
it's definitely not computer science but it's a somewhat close approximation for the low skilled workers that will someday become level 1/2 support.
if that's your intro into university then it's still a very low base to take you forward.