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Some interesting points there about education in the UK

1) using Visual Basic by default (which is obsolete in industry and was never even intended to be a pedagogical language anyway)

2) The reference to "ICT" which is a term that doesn't exist outside of schools.

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Depends what A-Level subject they're taking and school; at my school, they're taught Pascal and C (possibly moving into Objective-C this term if I finish installing the Macs into my department before the end of next week!)

At secondary school we had BBC Basic running in an emulator on the RM Nimbus, which had the mysterious 80186 processor. You could run Turbo Pascal if you first ran the 8086 emulator.

If I were designing the curriculum kids would be taught Forth or ML.

"using Visual Basic by default"

I don't believe that is the case. I know some schools teach BBC BASIC (for Windows), which of course was specifically designed for the purpose: http://www.bb4w.com/

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