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Comment by ec429 | Hacker News Reader

All I can say is, why has it taken them so long? Both the problem and the solution have been obvious for /years/. However, I'm glad the gov't have finally obtained some clue on this issue.

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The problem is mentioned: where to find enough qualified teachers?

I suspect that there are plenty of people qualified to teach programming, it's just that most people currently teaching ICT are not qualified to teach anything (if the idiots I was taught ICT by are at all representative). If the government dumped less shit on the head of teachers in general, perhaps they might be able to attract competent programmers away from industry and into the teaching rôle. (They would also attract competent people in general, instead of the current situation where about 5% of teachers are competent people who love teaching and haven't quite been driven away yet, and the rest are "those who can't, teach")

There are certainly people willing & able to teach programming, but most of them are not currently teachers, and many IT teachers would probably struggle to teach programming effectively. The article suggests that they want to make this change in the next academic year, so where are the teachers going to come from?

They could let those people become teachers without having to go through the rigmarole of largely useless training. The next academic year is nearly eight months away; that's /bags/ of time.

The barriers to entry to teaching are just another reason why so few good people go into teaching.

It's a bit unfashionable to point this out, but... the current govt has been around for a year and a half. The previous govt had thirteen years to do something about it.

Oh I agree that the previous govt were dreadful. But I can understand /Labour/ being bereft of clue. I expect better from the Tories. Then again, I suppose they've been a bit busy dealing with economic and european issues.

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