Bloody hell, Gove does something right for once. Well, you know what they say about a million monkeys on a million typewriters ... it was bound to happen, I suppose.

I thought for a moment he was actually talking about open source software (ie Linux, OpenOffice and the like) instead of promoting Microsoft products.

Slamming down on the arts whilst pushing for computer sciences is a typically cack handed way of thinking. Technology without design skills will lead to a very dull and unenterprising world.

Take the design out of Apple and you ain't left with much.

'Kin Hell. Gove makes the right decision for once. I guess, given the amount of spectacularly wrong decisions he has made in the last 18 months he had to get something right eventually, by the law of averages. Pity politicians didn't listen to the "ICT experts" 15 or 20 years ago; this sort of thing is what people like me have been advocating for a long time.

But hey, I guess, as teachers, our views automatically don't count, do they? We are, after all 'vested interests' only concerned about our own careers...

He's right. Well done Gove.

Now can he show some joined-up thinking? Is this going to be in the EBacc or will it be one of the subjects that doesn't matter in the public judgment of the school? Is he going to give them enough money to change the curriculum entirely, yet again, or train the teachers in the new skills required? Will the curriculum drawn up by industry be incredibly useful and incredibly boring, or will it show some innovation and engagement for kids?

We wait with baited breath.

Actually agree with this but his risk is immplemetning it so that students become avderts for a particular software company/ brand. If this is avioded then it has the potential tob be brilliant.

Has anyone who cannot teach themsleves word and excel really got a serious chance in anything to do with technology?

Of course, the problem is that we don't actually have any new qualifications for next year's KS4 students to take apart from the existing dull crap (though the new BTEC looks relatively interesting, but then anything does compared to watching paint dry).

Why not scrap IT altogether, it is a complete waste of time

Has anyone who cannot teach themsleves word and excel really got a serious chance in anything to do with technology?

Not the point - ICT is a compulsory subject and so it has to be taught to all students regardless of ability. For some students that means learning the basics of software they are likely to use when they enter the world of work, for others it can mean using the advanced features (i.e. writing macros and functioning systems). Excel doesn't just add numbers together.

Take the design out of Apple and you ain't left with much.

Well, you'd end up with the familiar beige box a.k.a. "commodity hardware", which has much lower cost and which for "the rest of us" - those who actually use their machines to get work done - happens to be perfectly adequate.

The UK used to have a great bedroom coder scene that led to us really punching above our weight when videogames turned into a multi-billion dollar industry (though sadly we're now being overtaking by Canada and Eastern Europe). This was mainly down to the government putting BBC computers in schools. So, while we can all agree that Gove is a twat, this is good to hear!

Although by the time all these kids graduate they'll probably have to move to India to find a job...

Why not scrap IT altogether, it is a complete waste of time

He said using IT infrastructure and software to tell us all it wasn't worth it...

I am not sure he is making the right decision.
Is he going to allow schools to choose what they teach?
Is one new course going to be developed with input from Industry that all schools will have to teach?
Is there going to be several courses that school/pupils choose from?
Who will choose the people who gives input into the course/courses?
If Gove and his crowd keep out it might be good , but................

oh, and

"we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch."

We already do.

The problem comes when you make the leap from WYSIWYG pseudo-programming to actual coding.

He may have got something right but he can do little about it for 2 reasons.

First of all, there's no money for any decent facilities or software - he might get a couple of ipads into his free schools but ICT budgets have taken an almighty whack over the last year so don't expect our students to be digitally literate when they're won't have access to any mildly impressive or inspiring materials.

Secondly - anyone with a computer degree would franky be mad to go into teaching. That's not even the ones scraping a 3rd or a 2:2. There's far more money in the private sector: this is proved by the fact that of 28000 new teachers last year, a paltry 3 of them had computer-related degrees.

About time secondary level computing and IT stopped being simply "how to use Microsoft Office Suite"

As I said, a dull and unenterprising world.

Credit where it's due? This could be the biggest aid to the "social mobility" from within the education system in living memory. I'm no fan of the current government or of Gove but by (potentially) turning our teenagers into active designers rather than passive users or consumers of technology the Old Etonians might just have let a genie out of the bottle?

Of course The Devil will no doubt make his usual appearance in the detail but as announcements go it's got to make more sense than spending squillions on getting a Birmingham bound train to arrive a little bit sooner than it used to?

I'm shocked. Not only has Gove actually said something that doesn't make me want to hit him with a wet fish, I actually agree with him.

A combination of Microsoft and complacency has left a generation barely capable of using an email client, let alone able to write a clone of pong.

These days, you can even write once, compile to lots of platforms in a language so close to English, it might as well be English.

Tomorrow I'll go back to disliking you very much, but you're safe today, Gove.

Schwitters, you are correct technology without design skill is dull.. Thankfully coding and computer science in general is an imaginative and creative process that requires a lot of design skills to solve problems.
Introducing students to the creative side of computing and electronics if anything is going to help bridge the gap between the cultures of art, science and technology.

Gove... has actually.. he's actually... no. Noooo. This can't be his idea, it must be an advisors idea. Probably one of those 'special' ones. The man simply could not have come up with an idea like this. You almost had me there Gove.

I wish this had been around a few years back. I'm brilliant with hardware, can take apart and put together a PC in no time. Sadly my software skills are lacking :( hoping to improve them very soon by taking optional modules at Uni... maybe sneak off with a Computer Science students notes....

No doubt the tories have some old school chums waiting in the wings that just happen to be '21st century IT education providers'. Thus providing yet another round of corporate welfare at a time of "essential austerity".

We're all in this together (so long as "we' means pig and the 'this' is a trough)

I don't think so. For me Apple products are not beautiful, it is the circuits, the code, the layout of the PC that is beautiful.

I have half my PC-case open just so I can look at the beauty inside. (Ok and so it doesn't melt when I overclock it but I like to look at it too.)

Gove has made a simplistic headline- catching comment.

IT is a tool to support the other subjects. Yes, word and Exel need to be demonstrated so they can be used effectively accross the curriculum in the same was as we teach grammar, punctuation, sentence structure - all of that boring too.. BUT
The teaching of all practical and technical subjects has been cut back in schools. We have seen woodwork, metalwork, Cooking and sewing disappear.

Where does Gove think the teachers are coming from to teach this non- boring computer programming? Where is the money coming from to provide 'cutting edge' materials and computers on which to do this work? What about class size?

No MrGove. You may have caught the attention of some people by using BORING in your speech. In my lengthy experience as a teacher, you could turn cartwheels and many children would still find it boring.
Finally....
What are you going to do when the bright and advanced learner manages to programme his (it's always a boy) way into the exam board and steals the questions? Or manages to delete hois bad record from the school system?

There are no easy simplistic vote catching answers, so dont fiddle with what you dont understand

step forward the new alan sugar ? :P

we can't all be software writers and the lie that we can should not be sold anymore than the idea we can all be artists.

its fun for some but a demanding and introverted hobby if you get into it.

i say that as someone who was there in the first wave and watched people i knew write million selling games for the spectrum and suchlike.

that said there should defiantly be a push to have something that sits between the MS approved "learn Word & Excel" classes and the idea that the only person who can program anything is someone with an engineering degree.

if you look around the actual industry people with engineering degrees ARE NOT the people who come out with new software that capture the publics imagination or head up computer games studios and the like.

the vast huge majority of those movers and shakers came originally from the "hobby" or "bedroom coder" side of things.

if we can support those people as they germinate and possibly teach them some business acumen at the same time then possibly we'd be onto something.

"Twenty years ago, only a tiny number of specialists knew what the internet was and what it might shortly become."

I'm fairly sure that, twenty years ago, every university student in the UK had access to JANET, and many had an email address as well.

While this appears to be a useful initiative, if handled right, justifying it on the back of wrong information doesn't inspire me with confidence (but then it's coming from Gove, so that's no surprise).

Are there actually decently-paying jobs for people with Computer Science qualifications?

In the U.S., many such jobs have already been either:
- outsourced to foreign countries: India, the Ukraine, etc.
- reserved for foreign workers under our infamous H-1B visa program.
The ones that are left don't pay very well because of the threat of further outsourcing or designation as an H-1B job.

The son of a friend of mine earned such a degree at San Francisco State a few years ago and thought himself lucky to get a job with a Google. However, the pay is terrible. I'd bet a small amount of money that in California, because they have pretty good unions, public school teachers and nurses get paid better than computer science graduates.

Great news.

I left the UK as an ICT teacher 3 years ago....utterly fed up with teaching crap to kids who deserved and actually wanted better. The ICT curriculum...mainly foisted on me by edexcel was utter garbage and completely irrelevant to todays needs. IT is treated in schools as about as relevant and as well funded as Latin.

The DIDA qualification actually came pretty close to what was needed..practical, engaging mainly relevant and interesting for students. It's been scrapped because too many students passed....they passed because it was interesting, challenging and they saw a point to what they were learning...guess that doesn't matter though. The GCSE and applied GCCE were and still are bullshit...don't get me started on the nationals.

ICT needs to be scrapped and bought up to date...programming, web developement, iphone apps, games development etc....teaching excel isn't gonna get anyone anywhere in a computing career.

I miss teaching kids in the UK...they're a lot more savvy than they're given credit for. and they deserve a hell of a lot better than the ICT curriculum delivered.

Just an opinion from the frontline.

Excel doesn't just add numbers together.

Unfortunately, that is all it does do for the vast majority of teaching in secondary schools - partly because there is a hopeless lack of staff who can teach advanced ICT. Most of the staff teaching ICT (as opposed to IT or Computing) are not specialist ICT teachers and are themselves only experienced in Word, Excel and some basic Access. That was Key Skills ICT teaching for a decade.

I find myself, rather uncomfortably, agreeing with Gove here but there is a huge resource issue (in terms of both equipment and staff) that makes implementing this in September complete fancy.

The emphasis is the right one. 12 years ago, the 16 and 17 year olds who came to me didn't know how to use Word Processors. Now my 9 year old daughter uses one proficiently - as do most of her classmates - and she can use the Internet for research and transfer and manipulate images and text into a word processor (any, the brand doesn't seem to matter).

But if the 9 year old can do most of what is currently taught in secondary schools, what are they going to teach them at secondary school when they get there? If they are to make any progress, secondary schools need to increase exponentially the range that is being taught. As it stands, the only kids who will make any progress are those who have parents who can provide the resources and the expertise at home.

Never mind September 2012, it's a huge challenge to put that new curriculum (and staff) in place for 2015.

But in the 80s I took a newspaper into my computer lessons to read, because the teacher knew so much less than we did as young teenagers and we were bored: so in some way nothing has really changed. But we taught ourselves what we knew. One of the difficulties is that teenagers in the 1980s used machines that were open, and generally started by programming BASIC. Where do you start with an iPad and a developer kit? It's much harder to find that entry point.

Take a look at this

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

A pox on private/public partnerships! ICT lessons by Microsoft, school lunch by MacDonalds and Textlish by Nokia?

Want some real fun in ICT? Give them open source software!!

Rather than tailoring students for business, give them skills for thinking about a future beyond those dreadful companies.

10 Echo 'SurrealMcCoy is Cool';
20 GoTo 10

Close enough ..... For Radio Shack glory!

what can i say bigideasdontgetany
we're a country that hates its children
ty for your interesting post

Having read the article, I agree with the sentiment, but I don't see anything at all about how IT teaching is gonna be changed in reality.

We all seem to agree that the proposal is correct, but I'm not seeing how the 'bored' Excel teacher suddenly starts holding coding dojos!?

Most people have no idea of the variety of jobs within an "IT" banner. It's no more all game generation than it is all excel jockeying.

Get real companies involved (MS might be 100% IT, but it's not typical). Engage schools whether you are big or small, but it's all upside.

Thank you. Fantastic project. Hope that will excite my young children even a fraction as much as what I grew up with. £3500 a little out of my price range for the pre-release limited editions 1/10, though I dearly wish it wasn't.

a lot of innovation, in other areas, has come from hobbyists and people teaching themselves in their bedrooms, history is full of them.

but as a country we seem to have become obsessed with the concept that all learning is done is classrooms, which encourages conformity.

the idea of finding ways to assist those who teach themselves is a good idea, but it involves surrendering control, while our current crop of politicians are serious control freaks.

i can't see an easy way for a lot of children to progress from user to inventor, in terms of computers, but i think part of the problem is that as a society we don't value those who teach themselves, and therefore don't understand them.

then there comes a point when we realise we need them, and foolishly imagine we can just produce more on some sort of production line in schools, which is a complete misunderstanding of the sort of person who likes to invent alone.

What is needed is regional FabLab's ?

http://www.fablabmanchester.org/

Fabrication Laboratory. It's a project started by MIT. I'll leave you to read up on it but the great thing is the standard set of equipment , focus on open ways of working and the ability to work over the web on design and manufacture collaboratively.
Now there is one in Manchester that been there a bit, i think one in London maybe and possibly Bradford as well. As well as many hackspaces up and down the country doing similar things. These are open to the public and business but what is needed is regional one's specifically for the use of schools. It would keep to the standard set of equipment set by FabLab and ideally be set up with the involvement of MIT, it would be funded by a combination of government and business.
It wouldn't be as expensive as you think, and areas of the country with historically strong manufacturing bases that have gone would benefit greatly from the exposure to modern methods and invigorate the economic potential in these areas.

Where is the money coming from to provide 'cutting edge' materials and computers on which to do this work?

Programming can be taught on rock bottom general purpose computers. Required software can be obtained at no cost: a plethora of good programming editors (accessorized versions of Notepad or simplified version of MS Word, depending on one's point of view) are available for free, as are various so-called toolkits for several important programming languages, amongst others Python which from a didactic point of view is a language of choice. One is not limited to teaching writing software for general purpose computers (or "apps" for smartphones for that matter), programming can be directly applied to hardware which is now available for a few quid and can be used to build small embedded systems (the kind of stuff that makes your washing machine work).

Cost is really not a problem. Finding competent teachers might be.

Finally....
What are you going to do when the bright and advanced learner manages to programme his (it's always a boy) way into the exam board and steals the questions? Or manages to delete hois bad record from the school system?

You clearly do not have the faintest idea what programming is about, and what it's used for. A mischievous kid could do all of the above and more, given a bit of a sloppy school network administrator, without writing a single line of code. Software that can be used for such purposes can be downloaded ready made from teh intarwebs, which is much quicker and easier than writing attack scripts yourself - not because the programming is difficult, but because using a ready made script saves one from having to figure out the vulnerabilities of the network or machine that one wishes to attack.

Oh calm down, people.
THis is a direct result of Eric Google coming here a few months ago.
And it is not quite the correct approach to IT.
It needs to be even freer so that the Arts are included.
Certainly teaching young people how Word works is not exactly IT for the twenty-first century.

The hell we don't. There are half a dozen perfectly good existing qualifications designed by the Computer Technology Industry Association and the big companies like Microsoft and Cisco. (And for better or worse, they're the companies whose products the majority of employers use, so we need to concentrate on those.) Suppose we had kids take the ECDL at the end of Key Stage 3, and then have GCSE be replaced by a combination of the CompTIA A+ and an entry-level course in web development or a programming language?

By withdrawing the programme of study, we're giving schools and teachers freedom over what and how to teach; revolutionising ICT as we know it."

Fine, but who is going to teach this? Unless, of course, the idea is that the more capable pupils show the teachers how to do it!

About 100 years ago when I was a young teacher and PCs' were new, the Government found enough money for a computer for each school - in my LEA at least. It arrived and we looked at it... and we tried to find the 'on' switch...and we couldn't. It never occured to us that it would be on the back of the machine. When we were told where to find it we switched it on and looked at it some more. It was DOS, of course, and we didn't have the vaguest idea what to do next. So it was kept safe in a cupboard. Some years later I was re-trained in Design Tech. Six glorious continuous weeks and we had everything - electronic boards, fluidics boards, compressed air and interfaces, sensors... Then I returned to school and there was no budget at all for re-tooling the dept. None.

In the army can you imagine a new hand gun arriving without a budget for training? Can you imagine training the soldiers for a weapon they'd ever be issued with?

So, lets hope this well thought of initiative is well thought through. Individual soldiers wouldn't be expected to sort out the new weapon on their own. Individual teachers shouldn't be expected to cobble things together either.

a BBC Micro for 2012

hahahaha cutting edge?....maybe ten years ago!

Current syllabuses are turgid because the exam boards set prescriptive exams. Nor do pupils get good grades by being good at Office apps, they have to mimic software engineers by following the design cycle to develop and produce a solution to a problem which was then submitted alongside their written papers. Written papers covered not just office apps, but general IT background. Nothing wrong with the last I hear you say? Except the syllabus is in my opinion almost completely irrelevant to the needs of commerce, Industry, or the IT industry.
What applies to GCSE apples equally to the ICT A-level, and I hope Gove scraps that as well.

This article confuses ICT and Computer Science. There is a Computer Science qualification, which is somewhat more technical, but again is largely to do with somewhat out-of-date nuts and bolts. Personally I'd retain a revamped A-level version of that alone, or rather, an equivalent which leads to a qualification recognised by industry.

At the moment the ICT GCSE is a wasted qualification for 16-18 school leavers, and the ICT A-level an irrelevance for anyone interested in Computing at University. Admission tutors will ignore it as a specialist qualification, and some will ignore it completely as a 'studies' qualification.

What about the teachers at the coal-face? I think this article is bloody insulting, and perhaps Gove is doing it deliberately. Ever since the 80's you have had teachers pushed into teaching IT without adequate preparation or knowledge, and the fault has to be laid in front of Headmasters who could have provided training, could have appointed more specialist teachers - but didn't. And requirements set by SMT and Directors of Studies who had little comprehension of what they were asking teachers to do. And overarching this, a department of education which has controlled the national curriculum to the extent exam boards have no option in what to set questions on, and teachers have no option what to teach. So the overall fault lies squarely in government's hands. All governments since the introduction of GCSEs many years back.

Most of these teachers are desperate to succeed, and exam board meetings, teacher chat rooms are full of people seeking advice in how to do just that.
There are teachers with a good grounding in IT. Often they don't teach IT: they'd be mad to. And those who do teach IT have been arguing hard about the inadequacies of syllabuses, exam boards, quangos, for years.

I am depressed however that it looks like Microsoft and Google (and no doubt Cisco and some others) will attempt a carve-up by providing schools with ready-built syllabuses which essentially sell their products. This we'll get pupils who are trained not educated. Gove needs to keep an eye on this, if he understands what's good for the UK. The British Computer Society's involvement could go either way - they have been responsible for the UK version of ECDL, and all their qualifications are currently based around ITQ, the IT Qualifications framework. Please please keep OFQUAL and other quangos well away from future developments. They, and predecessors, have been the dead hand on the tiller.

Britain should revive the legacy of the mathematician and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing by creating a generation of young people able to work at the forefront of technological change.

You already had that generation: the gen X kids who were some of the finest coders in the world. And you drove them away with shitty fiscal and monetary policies designed only for bankers and for propping up house prices.

Finally....
What are you going to do when the bright and advanced learner manages to programme his (it's always a boy) way into the exam board and steals the questions?

Simple. Stop watching WarGames and get back to the real world.