Number of girls in England taking computing GCSE plummets, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Number of girls in England taking computing GCSE plummets, study finds

theguardian.com

6 pointskipi10 comments

The Guardian has to make everything over-ly political and about class struggle.

The title is misleading. The article says:

"In numerical terms, 40,000 female students took ICT GCSE in 2015, with a further 5,000 taking computer science. In 2023, with ICT no longer available, just 18,600 females took computer science."

So actually, the number of girls taking computer science has gone from 5,000 to 18,600.

What has happened is that they scrapped the GSCE that was more computer skills than computer science.

Computer science is a very specific subject and schools do try to make everyone interested. In our school everyone tried programming through graphical "language" then Python. My daughter was very good at it but did not want to take GSCE computer science because she "hated it" although her teacher said she was "a natural". So what can you do? Everything is not about alienation by the "white patriarchal elite"...

To me it sounds strange that they are getting rid of ICT, which sound exactly something that could be useful in general for anyone operating in modern white collar office. Computer science certainly has place, but with challenges that younger generation seem to face with more desktop style computing to me it sounds something that was actually needed.

Yes, ICT is generally useful.

I think that ICT skills are built-in in the course of others subjects now, with more work being done online and on computers so that, in principle, pupils will learn in the course of their general studies.

Damn, this sucks. I hope they don't backpedal on the new curriculum.

But girls weren't ever going to get excited by computer science via word processing and spreadsheets.

I wonder if half the girls doing proper computer science will still be a net increase going into undergrad studies.

> While the government’s reforms were aimed at creating “more academically challenging and knowledge-based” qualifications, the introduction of the new syllabus has had the unintended consequence of driving female entries down, according to new research by King’s College London.

The insinuation here is wild!

What insinuation?

That female students could not handle reforms aimed at creating “more academically challenging and knowledge-based” qualifications?

They are not interested in the classes and did not enroll. You don't know if they could "handle" it or not.

"insinuation"

The report this is based on is here: scari.sites.er.kcl.ac.uk/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com