Re: Good words

"Essentially, the decision over which languages or technology to use will rest with a school board or the teachers themselves. This could be good, bad or just me being paranoid."

It will probably end up being a compromise. Just like some schools do French, some do German, some do Spanish... You need the teaching resources in place. I expect there will be a smattering of different approved options but no more (they'll need to be able to provide exam papers, after all). I wouldn't be surprised if Javascript is a popular language for this. The thought chills my blood, but it seems probable. It's directly translatable to them doing things on the web. Windows 8 actually lets you program Metro apps in Javascript + CSS + HTML5 so they can actually deploy stuff straight onto a popular OS if they want to and the development tools for it exist and aren't too hard to learn.

I'm not really much in favour of teaching programming at GCSE level. I think it inevitably gets treated at insufficient depth and it will all have to be re-done at University level again later. And really, whilst it's a great skill, it's so little directly applicable to many people's lives. If you do Science, then you may not become a scientist, but at least it raises the scientific knowledge level of society. Ditto History, etc. You can pick up programming and other directly career related skills later on if you choose to, and they'll be better taught, too. And yet, there are two things in favour of this: One - this has to be better than the instantly out of date crap that they call ICT at the moment (and would be better called Secretarial Skills + Dangerous Fragments of Knowledge). And two - we need to do something about the state of programming in this country. I suppose if this drums up interest and stokes ability, that is at least something. It might give the self-learners a better start.