ICT lessons revamped

The education secretary Michael Gove recently announced revolutionary plans for the ICT curriculum at the BETT show for educational technology in London.

The new curriculum will focus heavily on coding and programming, teaching pupils to create applications instead of use them. Speaking to BBC News, Mr Gove described the current ICT curriculum as “dull and demotivating”, and said that “the current lessons are irrelevant to today’s generation of children who can learn power point in a week”. He aims to make ICT lessons interesting and challenging, while at the same time teaching pupils to use the most basic and advanced computing language. But is this sudden change for the better or worse?

Some people argue that the new curriculum will focus to much on the advanced and the forget the basics. A pupil at KSHSSA told us “it’s easier when you’re learning to use apps because you can use them everyday at home, but when you’re learning to the programming and coding behind them it might become a lot more difficult.”

Some believe that the new curriculum will favor a narrower sector of people, such as those who are thinking of going into ICT programming, as opposed to those who will go to office work and teaching. The change also raises the argument that all ICT teachers would need to be specialists in coding instead of general ICT teaching to efficiently teach the redesigned curriculum.

Others, however, are in favour of the plans. Nicki, a pupil in Year 8 at KSHSSA says, “I think that’s a really good thing for people like me who want to be a computer programmer, as I don’t think we get the chance to develop our skills as much at the moment.”

The planned changes to the ICT curriculum are set to come into effect this September. Whether is succeeds or not is up to the schools, and we’ll see how it plays out this September!