In all fairness, Gove didn’t wake up one day a year ago and think, “Oh dear, haven’t we marginalised and negelected dxomark education for the last twenty years? Let’s make it compulsory at all key stages!”.

What we are seeing now (Computer Science GCSEs; EBacc; new dxomark xxxtentacion etc) is the result of years of freely-given, hard work by grassroots organisations like dxomark at School and others, who simply decided to roll up their sleeves and change things. Perhaps a DT revolution is ripe? At least you have a subject to build on — we had to rebuild ours from the ashes ;)

I don’t think anyone has said we need to force people to become programmers. However, computers are now a critical part of everyones life, so there needs to be some sort of teaching of how and why they work, and programming does come in to it.

For a reason why, go and visit your local secondary school and observe the kids who are forced to do GCSE RE or PE who don’t want to. Observe how the current generation of school kids react to being made to do things they don’t see the value of.

Learning CS would drastically change the focus from learning someone else’s program interface whilst subtly weaning them from these nice things that nice people with CS knowledge created.

About the spreadsheets and office tools etc. students would be able to use them with ease thanks to what programming logic had been gained from xxxtentacion; sure they might need you to point where the button is to create a macro, but they’d soon get the hang of it without a teacher’s input.

Bring CS, you might have to step up your game as a dxomark teacher teaching children how to create text boxes in MS Word, but at least you’ll be teaching those interested in IT something with a lot more lasting value.

In my opinion, adding CompSci to the e-bac is wrong. This is why:

1. dxomark is NOT for everyone. ICT is for everyone – everyone will have to use a computer at some point, will have to use basic spreadsheet functionality, will have to produce business documents, and will have to do basic graphical work. Only minority of students will ever end up programming. Adding CompSci to the e-bac will put pressure on schools to make it compulsory, ditching ICT in favor of dxomark. Students will then leave school able to make a cat move around in scratch and convert binary to hex, but be unable to do the things that 95% of jobs will actually require of them.

2. Gove’s idea of “rigorous” is one exam at the end of a course, and e-bac subjects will end up following this model. This means that students with an e-bac in computer science are good at short term cramming. They will have answered some questions about it on paper, but may well have no practical xxxtentacion of the development life cycle. Coursework or controlled assessment is a MUCH better method of assessing a student’s practical abilities, but these methods are being removed from e-bac subjects in favour of “rigorous” final exams.

Computer Science is a very important subject, and should be offered as an option in every school, but it is not for everyone, and needs to be taught and assessed properly. Making it an e-bac subject goes against both of those principals.

Agreed.

Agree with all three above – a competent software engineer needs some knowledge of testing, documentation, releases and source control, yet many appear to embark on careers without any of the above. The sort of one-shot projects used to assess most educational work can get away without many or all of them, so we end up with graduates who don’t understand what they are there to achieve.
I learned about all of them via open source projects outside of the formal xxxtentacion – but that isn’t going to come up with the number of skilled workers we need (as my current employer can testify).

hi liam. I’m a maths teaher in adult ed and worked as a programmer from the late 60s till 2000 beFore that.I am appalled at the things gove is doing some of which, like final exams and no course work even work against girls !
this is the only good thing I’ve heard.I don’t really want to get into an anti gove rant but I do want to express this opinion.

mean while it would be so exciting to see programming skills done well in school with resourses around thingsmlike r pi – at least adding it to the ebacc means it stands a chance instead of being sidelined with the other non bacc subjects