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Comment by estel | Hacker News Reader

It's a separate but related problem that ICT in UK schools is unequivocally not about any sort of programming or software development, and very much focussed only on teaching pupils how to use the various components of Microsoft Office.

Arguably, this is more relevant for the majority of people, but these are easily skills that can be incorporated into other classes where relevant, and the complete dearth of programming remains a crying, crying shame.

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What are these "UK schools"? From what I can tell the Scottish courses do include development. Here are some past exam papers and coursework:

http://www.sqa.org.uk/pastpapers/findpastpaper.htm?subject=C...

Pretty sure that the Scottish education system is different

"Computing" is not the same as "ICT" as a subject. Though it's true the that Scottish Higher system is almost uniformly better than the English and Welsh "A" Levels/GCSEs, there is also something resembling Computer Science on the latter's curriculum ("Computing"). Here it is (for the AQA board):

http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/ict/computing_noticeboard.php...

The trouble is, and this is true of all areas of the UK, is that the Computer course is not offered and "ICT" is offered instead. ICT is the "Microsoft Office" qualification that people are referring to. If you're 16-18 and want to study "Computing", chances are that your school doesn't offer it or the staffing is painfully poor. At my university, a few years ago, there were only a tiny handful of people who'd taken a good quality course in Computer Science in college or sixth form.

This is exactly the problem. If you want to get involved in promoting computing at school (rather than ICT) have a look at

http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/

By "UK schools", it'll almost definitely be referring to GCSE (general certificate of secondary education) qualifications. And in this case, in ICT (Information Communications Technology; which doesn't contain any/no real programming).

So a couple (real) ICT GCSE exam can be seen here:

http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/pp_08_jun/ocr_31318_pp_08_jun... http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/pp_08_jun/ocr_31316_pp_08_jun...

They actually do contain a bit more 'technical' stuff than when I did ICT GCSE (~7 years ago I guess?), but there's still not much.

As for this story, I agree with an earlier comment that there might be another side to this. None of my ICT teachers (as far as I know) knew how to program, but at the same time I can't imagine any of them would have failed a clearly-good piece of coursework.

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