When Microsoft are using a 5 year old, stitching photos together by himself using their software in their advertisments on TV, you know we lag behind. Ok, its a fair cop to be able to ‘know’ the background ‘theory’ of what is going on in the process but at this age its the engagement of doing something and producing something at the end that will spark the interest in the children.

And perhaps the teachers?

Perhaps the real problem is not the lack of knowledge of state-of-the-art equipment, which will be forgotten about by the time these children leave school; but the lack of the one on-going key IT skill – the ability to touch type. If touch-typing was put alongside the 3Rs, that really would transform the skills base of this country.

If you are of a political bent your question, to be answered in essay form, is:
“Compare and contrast the centralised nature of the British Education System after the 1988 Education Reform Act with the ‘de-centralising’ rhetoric of politicians.

The British Education System is very like a dinosaur: the “brain” (in Whitehall) is a very long way from its limbs, and even the simplest command to change direction takes an age to happen. In the case of IT Education this is exacurbated by the studied pose of ignorance of any ‘technical’ discipline essential for those who wish to climb the greasy pole.. History, Latin, English, Physics (etc) are all OK, and although the rate of change is slow, it is generally informed by some knowledge in the hierachy. ICT on the other hand might just as well be “Martian” for all the Mandarins know or care…..

That is not to say lip-service is not paid in full. My Mrs who is a Primary Head (and very IT savvy) recently attended some high-level DfE (or whatever it is this week) bash proclaiming the merits of ICT as part of the renewal of schools programme (a PFI programme). The problem is that most of thos epresent thought that all that is required is to bung in “Networks”. Nuff said….

However, I think the problem goes a bit deeper. What do we really want to get from IT qualifications?

We need to find a balance between training students in up to date skills (which will soon be out of date), “academic” theory (which gives ICT equivalence to other subjects) and finding a way to maintain some relevance to teenagers who have naturally developed web (especially social networking) skills but little understanding of what goes on “under the bonnet”. Add in the need to make all this useful to employers too, and it’s quite a challenge.

Perhaps the new Diplomas will save the day…

Barry Collins
Online Editor

I pointed out that the software only initially started on a disc and was in fact installed locally on each hard drive (pushed out as a msi via the network), so if that counted, surely an Internet-based encyclopaedia (which would be stored on a server hard drive) would also count. Our head of ICT agreed, but the exam board didn’t, for some reason.

So now that all our GCSE students have completed that component of their coursework, I can no uninstall Encarta from those 90 PCs, ready to install it again for next year.

The best thing is that they search for Encarta files by going to the Encarta website, which then links them to files on the Internet, or files on the local disk. Guess which one has more content?

Even in 1999 they knew about spell-checkers that could spot “chesse” though systems may not have been able to identify the other error in the first paragraph.

Saying that it’s clear that IT education needs a huge amount of reform. I’d assume that the majority of visitors to PC Pro will understand the massive changes in IT over the last 10 years… and reform would undoubtedly be welcome not only as outlined above but also for the IT GCSE (I haven’t forgotten PC Pro’s rather poor attempts last year: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/199734/the-ridiculous-gcse-ict-exam-questions-that-beat-pc-pro.html : any chance the PC Pro staff will have another go?)