back to article 2 kool 4 komputing: Teens' interest in GCSE course totally bombs

The number of pupils signing up for GCSE computing has plateaued just years after the qualification was introduced, raising concerns that not enough is being done to help teachers with more difficult courses. According to the latest figures from exam watchdog Ofqual, 67,800 pupils were due to sit the GCSE (General Certificate …

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  1. werdsmith Silver badge

    My son did GCSE computing and scored A, but then promptly dumped it for science at A Levels.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
      Unhappy

      "My son did GCSE computing and scored A, but then promptly dumped it for science at A Levels."

      The way pay has always been in science, and the way it seems to be going in IT, both seems to be mugs' games these days.

      1. Nolveys
        Windows

        @Doctor Syntax

        The way pay has always been in science, and the way it seems to be going in IT, both seems to be mugs' games these days.

        Nail on the head there. The only people who seem to be making good money these days are those who can somehow skim off the top or downright steal or extort (or work for the government). Anyone who does actual work for a living is screwed.

        If I had a kid and they said they were going into computing as a career I think I'd have the same reaction as Thomas Jane at the end of The Mist.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          "or work for the government"

          Oi. I did that in science for some years and I can tell you pay and prospects were crap. You did not get to "skim off the top" in science in the Civils Service.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Precisely what my daughter did. She got an A* in GCSE computing, then at A Level did Maths, Further Maths, Chemistry and Physics. Why? Even if she wanted to do a Degree in a computing based subject, Computing A-Levels are not required, merely 'useful'. More general, 'academic' A Levels increase your choice of degree options, and are more impressive to the better universities. And, I can concur with the article : teaching ability in secondary school computing courses is very patchy. Only good one encountered was a techie who'd been in industry for years, then swapped to be a teacher as a lifestyle choice. The rest were totally clueless. One of them was a 'career' PE teacher for christ's sake.....

      1. DJV Silver badge
        Joke

        "'career' PE teacher"

        Yeah, only good for a quick somersault over a Skovox Blitzer and then get run over crossing the road a few days later.. lightweights!

    3. Primus Secundus Tertius

      If they are bright enough to read the news, they will have read how computer jobs are outsourced at the drop of a cost analysis presentation. Also, their older relatives may be able to tell first hand stories of outsourcing.

      So why bother, when you are not really wanted?

      1. gandalfcn Silver badge

        So why bother, when you are not really wanted?

        Perhaps they should have a word with Mrs. May, she cares about the country, its economy and future, doesn't she?

      2. Kane
        Thumb Up

        "computer jobs are outsourced at the drop of a cost analysis presentation"

        Like it, gonna try and use that in a meeting later on.

    4. DropBear

      "My son did GCSE computing and scored A, but then promptly dumped it for science at A Levels."

      Not really surprising - neither is worth doing for the money, but at least science might turn out to be interesting with a bit of luck - on the other hand, nobody dreams of herding databases and debugging misbehaving cloud instances...

    5. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Was listening to an interview from a few years ago about this. The obviously young interviewer and the obviously young interviewee were exploring the possibilities and the interview seemed surprised that computer science and programming should be taught "at high school level" and the teach said there was a "gap in the market". FFS, do these people know nothing? I was doing programming as part of Computer Studies O and A level almost 40 years ago!

  2. Thomas Gray

    I told you so

    Computing Science (which existed as a GCSE for years before this "initiative" - heck, it was originally an O-Level) isn't for everyone. ICT is the gateway drug for most people, teaching as it did problem solving skills through 4th Gen tools. It should never have been dropped in the name of "progress" from (ironically) the Conservative party

    1. Naselus

      Re: I told you so

      Rubbish. I did an ICT GCSE back in the 1990s and it was literally just training in using MS Office - a month each in Excel, Word, Publisher (like anyone uses Publisher), Access and Powerpoint. We had whole hour-long lessons based around using Wordart ffs. What little 'programming' was involved was learning to make Excel macros. You'd get more problem solving skills from an English Lit class.

      I'd been building PCs from components and learning to code by myself for 4-5 years by that point and so dropped the subject in disgust. From my school, literally no-one who completed the class got an IT-related job or degree; a lot of them were driven away from the whole area by their experience.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I told you so

        I did O-level Computer Science a few years before you and we had to do programming and there was no learning of MS tools.

        We had to do some machine code programming and at least two projects going from requirements analysis all the way to implementation.

        We also had to learn the basics of circuit design, logic gates etc.

        I'm not saying it was perfect but it did give you an overview of what was what.

        As I think is the case now the biggest problems seemed to be getting a teacher who actually knew something about the topic.

  3. aidanstevens

    90% of jobs might require "digital skills" but how many of those will be exclusively using proprietary systems that a GCSE won't teach them?

    1. AMBxx Silver badge

      It's a bit like saying 'all jobs need people to be able to drive', 'Let's teach everyone to be a mechanic'.

      1. kmac499

        "It's a bit like saying 'all jobs need people to be able to drive', 'Let's teach everyone to be a mechanic'."

        A well educated\trained mechanic is a skilled and honourable post, actually I think this is more like 'well all jobs need people to be able to drive let's teach car engine design with metallurgy, thermodynamics etc etc. '

        Dumping the ICT in favour of CompSci is the typically elitist British attitude of the more academic the better and the oiks will appear by magic.

        Yes we need 'pure' Computer scientists, but we need a damn site more skilled and flexible computer tradesmen and women. People who do know that processors are built out of transistors wired as logic gates, but are more concerned and capable at getting the network working and the website published today.

        1. Tom 7

          RE: Its a bit like

          no it bloody isn't. Its more like saying 'If we teach you how to read a road map, some engineering, some civil engineering, some geography, and most of all some common sense and the logic behind many many human constructs, you may be able to understand why we need all the above jobs, how to fit them into an efficient system to help people move forward'

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      "90% of jobs might require "digital skills" but how many of those will be exclusively using proprietary systems that a GCSE won't teach them?"

      Right. There needs to be encouragement to look at all available course, but teaching every pupil CompSci is not essential by any means. But it should be an available choice. A good rounded education is good for everyone, even if much of the stuff you learn is never used again. There are large chunks of my education that I've never needed to know since I studied it, but the overall general knowledge and the ability to know what I don't know but does exists somewhere can still be useful. I don't need to know the terms of the Versaille Peace treaty any more, but knowing it was one of the causes of the lead up to WW2, ie learning from historical mistakes and thinking through the likely consequences of decisions, is useful.

  4. cs94njw

    Woohoo! Skills shortage == more pay for us oldies.

    Sheesh - young people are mugs :( High pay, chilled out work place, portability across industries,.... oh, and it being the future of everything.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "Woohoo! Skills shortage == more pay for us oldies."

      You think so? Just do as you're told & train your Indian replacement.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I know that I can get a team of 4 brilliant developers from the Philippines for the cost of 1 contractor from the UK. I also know that I dont need to be in the same room, building or country as they are for them to work well. They are happy to work UK or US hours, not a problem. If one or more of them don't work out, there are a smorgasbord of others to chose from. Programming could go the same way as steel making or coal mining in the UK : other places can do it cheaper, you'd need a stunningly good reason to do it locally.

        1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

          4 brilliant developers

          Yea, about that (but I posted that already)

          you'd need a stunningly good reason to do it locally

          Like, because you are suddenly just another 3rd world country, possibly even being bombed by the US for insubordination to their foreign policy goals.

          When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

          1) music 2) movies 3) microcode (software) 4) high-speed pizza delivery

          So, okay, in that Neal Stepehenson quote, one would probably have to remove 1), 2) and 3). And who wants pizza?

          No wait, there is still fintech. Ah, never mind.

          1. Phukov Andigh Bronze badge

            bravo!

            except our pizza will soon be delivered by robots and there's no decent "Italian Mafia".

            Uncle Enzo for President!

            Stephenson was a visionary. Everything else, is coming true, except for the pizza delivery. Until I get a Deliverator car in my garage, I don't count that future as having arrived :P

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          one good reason

          How about the long term cost of loosing control of everything your country does that relies upon computers by giving it to another country.

          You want to see the cost then just look at what happened when we relied upon Microsoft and destroyed our home grown and superior efforts, M$ have us by the short and curlies and we just allowed the the home grown company (ARM) to be sold off.

        3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          "I know that I can get a team of 4 brilliant developers from the Philippines for the cost of 1 contractor from the UK. I also know that I dont need to be in the same room, building or country as they are for them to work well."

          You've missed an important point. You think they don't need to be in the same room etc. In fact there's a lot to be said for developers - we used to call them analyst/programmers - being able to talk to the people who were doing the work your S/W would be helping them with. That way you would find out what was actually needed. You could maybe fast-prototype something and get feedback.

          Your 1 contractor in the UK, if carefully selected, working with the end user will be worth the money. The actual cost might work out closer than you thought and you'd likely get better value for money via a better product.

  5. ciderbuddy

    Not the Biggest Shock

    I enrolled to gain my PGCE Secondary last september in CS after graduating, and I agrre alot with this article.

    The plans laid out for the curriculum are very ambitious indeed -not unachievable, but very ambitious.

    I agree though that training teachers properly is the only way this will succeed.

    One of my interests in the new curriculum was that it is a chance to build some key soft skills through CS, as well as stronger national skills in maths and problem solving (that was my utopian dream anyway )

    CS can be the driest subject in the world to both learn and teach - they require a level of curiosity, and at the moment schools seem to be teaching them as if they are teaching times tables in a Victorian factory school.

    Get the kids working together to solve problems -computer science is not just coding!

    The other mistake I have seen alot is that they use the computers for everything they do. Students don't need to record their binary homework on a word document, and then encouraged to save it within a file structure that is meaningless. I have spent quite a few lessons showing them how to save work - all I wanted to do was give them a pen and paper and stick them in pairs.

    Thanks

    (an ex-student teacher who went back to developing)

  6. MrJOD

    Too Hard? WTF

    Just been through GCSE selection with my son, who adores programming and is confident in Python (and, increasingly, in C#). We spent a long time time looking through the syllabus and exam expectations.

    Our conclusion: it would have been a waste of his time, although he would probably have received a top grade.

    Problems:

    - Use of VB.Net for the course. I, and several other parents (there are quite a number of parents at my son's school who work in the technology sector) queried the sanity of this as a choice - apparently it seems that the more mainstream languages are too challenging for less able students.

    - 100% examination based. This was the real WTF. How can you have a usable qualification in computer science based only on the ability to answer questions about how loops might be used for iteration.

    It seems, talking to parents, that many of the most able students are put off because they perceive the course as boring and the less able see it as too difficult.

    1. ciderbuddy

      Re: Too Hard? WTF

      translate: "mainstream languages are too challenging for less able teachers." The 100% examination thing is also the best way to kill any interest in CS for pupils stone dead.

      When they began phasing the controlled assessments out my tutor was shocked to see things going backwards after they had just starting moving forwards.

      1. ridley

        Re: Too Hard? WTF

        As a teacher I can see why controller assessments were phased out, there was just too much blatant cheating going on. Sadly most of it was by the teachers.

        I made myself very unpopular indeed when I went to the deputy head and said I wanted none of it and would refuse to do what I was seeing going on around me. Strangely enough since then I have never taken another CA but it has made my life difficult as I am not seen as a "team player".

    2. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: Too Hard? WTF

      It has changed since my son did it. It was Python and lots of course work.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Too Hard? WTF

      When I did computing at school back in 1975 it was way too hard. Programs were hand punched onto cards and the teacher took them to the local technical college to be run on their mainframe.

      The one exception was when I was allowed to visit the college for a couple of hours one afternoon. I typed my long program (I recall it was playing a patience card game) onto a teletype and took the resulting roll of punched paper tape to the hallowed computer room for the white coated operator. Unspeaking he took my tape offering and fed it through a tape reader into a collection bin. I expected the line printer to burst into life but it didn't. He fished the end of the tape out of the bin and wound it back up with a tape winder. Perhaps he needed to press some button to make my program run and start printing the results? Instead he handed me the rolled up tape and uttered the words "Parity error" and turned away. My audience was over.

      Too Hard? WTF

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: Too Hard? WTF

        Same period, same computing. But we were also given and IBM teaching computer. It looked like one of their tills, even the same red colour. And at lunch times we spent our time entering codes that would make the machine "take the contents of cell xx and add it to the contents of cell yy. Place the result in cell aa".

        When years later I finally got my Acorn Electron I had all the skills I needed to write code in BBC BASIC and more usefully, assembly language. But would I have taken computing as an 'o' level subject? Not a chance. That would have made the fun into work. I've been an amateur with some semi-professional IT involvement for most of my career. largely because I had those skills in a time when they were rare. That's very different from kids today being asked to train as code monkeys from the ages of 10, whether or not they want to make it their lives. (Or even whether they have any aptitude for it).

    4. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Too Hard? WTF

      "apparently it seems that the more mainstream languages are too challenging for less able students."

      The downside of results based targets.

      What school in their right mind is going to encourage students onto "hard" courses when results are everything?

    5. oolitic

      Re: Too Hard? WTF

      VB.Net fits the GCSE specification better than most languages, as well as having a respectable IDE. Remember this is not about "learning a language", it's about learning the fundamental programming constructs and using them to solve problems. The language is there to demonstrate and illustrate the concepts, which can be awkward when (for example) they need to understand arrays but then write stuff in Python which doesn't have them.

      Most specs are not 100% exam based, was it WJEC you were looking at? It's come down in the new specifications - the main ones (OCR and AQA) used to be 60% coursework, but only 20% now (probably because there were loopholes in the coursework admin that you could drive a high-scoring bus through...).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Too Hard? WTF

        "Python which doesn't have them"

        lol what

        "probably because there were loopholes in the coursework admin that you could drive a high-scoring bus through"

        It's because Michael Gove didn't believe coursework was real work.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    When you deskill for 40 years and then promote outsourcing to other countries....

    ....what value does a local qualification hold?

    Worse, since GCSE computing has become more like RSA business studies with all the emphasis being on using Microsoft products, advertising and presentations but virtually nil on how computers actually work so you have skills that are independant from vendors then what do you expect?

    Then we try to revert to computing science but use the same BS teachers good plan, my daughter took this as a option and they do not teach how to do anything just refer the kids to the online documentation. So Dad has to help with finding primes but cannot use Sieve of Eratosthenes because that is too far off the expectations.

    If they want computing science again then you are going to have to teach some science, logic, electronics and not use visual basic.

    1. ciderbuddy

      Re: When you deskill for 40 years and then promote outsourcing to other countries....

      You must be looking in the wrong places then as Raspberry Pi is the new focus. M$ package dullness is being pushed out by any school with any sense

      (apart from those cashing oin on BCS's European licence garbage)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: When you deskill for 40 years and then promote outsourcing to other countries....

        You must be looking in the wrong places then as Raspberry Pi is the new focus. M$ package dullness is being pushed out by any school with any sense

        Plenty of RPi at home none at school, a bit of scratch in year 7 but again on Microsoft now year 10, perhaps having the exam before bothering to teach it was optimistic.

        1. ridley

          Re: When you deskill for 40 years and then promote outsourcing to other countries....

          I agree re the use of Raspberry Pi's (the STEM GCSE looks pretty bad though) but the Raspberry Pi foundation are not helping school's by making the RaPi Zero only available singularly.

          I want to fit out a lab and using Zero's would be a considerable saving but it is hardly an option when you order one at a time.

          Why don't they just charge a few quid more or subcontract the manufacturing out? I will bet that there are loads of manufacturers that would love to mass produce them.

    2. oolitic

      Re: When you deskill for 40 years and then promote outsourcing to other countries....

      GCSE computing has never been as you describe. That's pretty much what ICT became, which is why the whole thing got rejigged in the first place.

      Teacher skills are definitely a problem.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HTTP is where it's at...

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
      Black Helicopters

      HTTPS is where it's at.

      FTFY

      1. bob, mon!

        Methinks you're conflating http/https with html.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Someone thinks that page description markup has to do with CS.

          LaugingGirls.jpg

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            "Someone thinks that page description markup has to do with CS"

            Of course it does. Rory Cellan-Jones says it's "coding" so it must be right.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          I think I discombobulated.

      2. ridley

        Don't be daft our web filtering system would have a fit with 100's of kids producing HTTPS.

  9. ratfox
    WTF?

    computer science graduates regularly top the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency's unemployability rankings.

    In this time and age, it's a pretty damning statement on the quality of the education.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Most computer science courses in the UK are absolute arse. Three years of basic programming classes building up to doing a trivial web app in HTML/CSS, JS and MySQL. Little to no appreciation of algorithms, systems design, language theory, discrete mathematics, statistics, machine architecture, logic, networking, information theory etc. etc.

      They're barely employable as basic code monkeys, let alone proper engineering or ops staff.

      The group of universities in the UK still doing proper CS to a good level at undergraduate is perishingly small.

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