BBC begins kids coding push with Bitesize and TV shows

I'd argue against your point that many software jobs have been outsources/offshored - at least not any more than other major western economies. The UK has a relatively large software industry - game development, european headquarters of various large technology multinationals, a thriving tech scene in Silicon Roundabout / Cambridge / starting in the north of England, and a fairly large hobbyist arena. If anything, this push will bring the jobs that have been offshored back to the UK as the talent pool grows.

I would say most mass market software people here are working for peanuts in a digital marketing firm. Not sure how that relates to these programmes... but

I disagree. There have a been a large number of companies requiring software developers opening up new offices in Northern Ireland over the last few years and existing ones have been expanding.

I think it is changing, I work for the civil service in the UK and there is a drive toward more in house staff than contractors.

Its because software programming is easy

I think seeing it simply as "learn to code" is too limiting. Programming is a means for humans to implement math and logic with real world effects. Perhaps early efforts will be rote and unenlightening, but I would hope that learning programming is a vehicle towards instilling a greater literacy of logic and numeracy in our society.

I think it's more a fear that programming will eventually leave everyone else without a job. Hence if you can't program in the future, you'll be in as much difficulty as someone who say, can't read/write in an office job - permanently relegated to simple manual labour.

If you want to be really cynical, it's GCHQ wanting a bigger talent pool.

Programming salaries in the UK aren't really that high, plenty are advertised at sub £20k.

Being a programmer in the modern age is like being a wizard, and it's no surprise that other wizards are concerned that people might learn their magic.

I'd love it if everyone could program, it'd make my life a lot easier and I could do something else interesting.

Also if your job is easy enough to be done by a schoolchild after minimal training, I'm not sure you deserve it.

Allowing for inflation, programmer salaries have been flat since 2000. Law, medicine, accounting - all of these absolutely pay more and are more secure jobs.

Programming is relevant to more than just computer science grads- it seems like every week there's a story of a motivated professional who is not what you would typically call a programmer finding a way to automate a task through programming and saving huge amounts of time and money in the process.

We're talking coding here, not computer science. Computer scientists make the developments that then get engineered in to the tools we use to code with, the platforms we use to code on, etc..

People using computers more in a greater range of disciplines at a deeper level doesn't seem like it would necessarily impact on CS at all - there might be more standardisation reducing the demand for new tools. There might be more focussed advances where one or two CS workers get their work adopted in to current tech. Both these things would lead to less employment of CS grads (in CS) wouldn't they?

It might also be that specialists without domain knowledge are not as desirable as those with domain knowledge who can go on to train in CS (or to add IT skills, which I just noticed are wrapped up with the stats you quote for CS).

To add an extra prong to the enquiry, does http://www.prospects.ac.uk/options_mathematics.htm showing only 55% of those studying mathematics having a job mean that we should not teach mathematics to the general school population?

That includes "IT" degrees, many of which are low end courses at former polytechnics designed to churn out graduates, I don't know how that compares to the unemployment rate of "real" CS.

Gamedev in the UK today is but a shadow of its former self.

I don't think kids should learn to use cutlery at such early age, not without proper ethics training. Cutlery gives you a lot of power. The power to do both good and evil. Children just don't have that kind of judgement.

If you teach a kid to eat with a knife and fork and they end up stabbing someone, who is going to take responsibility? Does the kid get tried as an adult or juvenile?