> The Learning & Work Institute says the number of young people taking IT subjects at GCSE has dropped 40% since 2015.
2015 being the year the IT and ICT GCSEs (which featured potentially little or no programming) begun being phased out and replaced with a more academically rigorous and programming-focused Computer Science GCSE.
Unsurprisingly, this led to a drop in the number of schools offering "IT subjects" at GCSE because it is harder to find qualified teachers for it; and any change like that is likely to depress numbers at least temporarily, and maybe permanently if the new syllabus is objectively harder.
Interestingly my wife is a school teacher and frequently leans on me to create IT lesson plans for her school. She's smart so the issue isn't her capability to understand the subject, the issue is the lessens require teaching Python (originally) and Javascript (later) and the source material isn't very good at explaining programming languages to non-programmers who teach. So I ended up creating a new series of lessons for them that was easier to teach, still taught the fundamentals of programming languages, but was also more fun for the kids to learn.
She works at a large school and had that school not been lucky enough to have a spouse who's a developer, I'm not sure what 120+ kids (per year group) would have ended up being taught. Not all schools are so fortunate.
> and the source material isn't very good at explaining programming languages to non-programmers who teach
How can you explain something to someone if they have no knowledge about it?
It doesn't matter how smart your wife is, this is an impossible task unless you actually learn the thing.
It would be like asking someone who doesn't know calculus to create a lesson plan to teach calculus. When you put it like that it sounds pretty ridiculous.
That school is definitely lucky that you helped out, but I don't think the root issue is the source material.
> How can you explain something to someone if they have no knowledge about it?
That's generally the point of an explanation: to impart knowledge to someone who didn't previously have it. :)
> It doesn't matter how smart your wife is, this is an impossible task unless you actually learn the thing.
She doesn't need to train as a software developer to teach the basics of programming languages. She just needs to understand the basic blocks she's going to teach herself. In my case, I taught her what a variable is and how strings and integers are different types of variable. Then I taught how how to right a while loop, comparisons and print to the screen. From there she was able to teach the kids to write a simple "higher or lower" computer game. This is all stuff her source material should have covered but didn't.
This is how a lot of teaching works- the teachers often have knowledge marginally above the level of the class they’re teaching, and are teaching out a book/syllabus with no flexibility
It doesn’t work for programming because most people haven’t studied it tor years at school (unlike maths, literature, etc.), so can’t help solve the problems that crop up under the hood so often.
> This is how a lot of teaching works- the teachers often have knowledge marginally above the level of the class they’re teaching, and are teaching out a book/syllabus with no flexibility
In high school, our computing textbook contained blatant errors. I tried to explain this to the teachers, but soon realised they didn't know anything about the subject at all, they were just repeating the textbook without understanding it.
(Example: our textbook falsely claimed TCP/IP used parity bits as an error detection mechanism. No, it uses ones' complement checksums. I referred to RFCs 791 and 793. The teacher had no idea what an RFC was.)
Yes I know, and I think it's an extremely poor method. My younger siblings have atrocious fundamental math skills because teachers don't understand the fundamentals themselves.
My 1970s grammar school teachers in a typical northern working class town knew their subject inside out and could take an able student all the way to Oxford or Cambridge. In the 80s new directives increased teachers' admin workload killing extra-curricular activities such as our prize-winning chess team. That's the UK education system for you.
I would hate to oblige you, but if you could share either the principles behind that lesson plan, or the plan itself, that would help a lot of teachers. They might not always be strong on respecting intellectual property, but they sure love some on-line organisation. I know I’d love it to help “non-technical” colleagues understand that software is not a priesthood.
There are some good online resources. Udacity 101 and 102 for example https://www.classcentral.com/course/udacity-intro-to-compute...
Maybe the answer is for teachers who don't know the stuff to follow something like that? Not quite sure how that particular one would work with school kids - might be pitched a bit too high level.
Interesting talk by one of the advisor's of the government's new computing education, Simon Peyton Jones, best know for being one of the main contributors to Haskell's GHC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-AIbtus9gs
2015 being the year the IT and ICT GCSEs (which featured potentially little or no programming) begun being phased out and replaced with a more academically rigorous and programming-focused Computer Science GCSE.
Unsurprisingly, this led to a drop in the number of schools offering "IT subjects" at GCSE because it is harder to find qualified teachers for it; and any change like that is likely to depress numbers at least temporarily, and maybe permanently if the new syllabus is objectively harder.