Aral Balkan

The UK government is looking to remove Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) from the core curriculum and remove funding for it entirely. Anna Debenham, who recently attended a Think Tank organised by Naace, just wrote a blog post on what was discussed that summarizes the status quo. In it, she states:

I was saddened to learn that many of the people in the room were in the process of being made redundant. Schools are already axing ICT from their offerings, before the government has even announced anything. Their whole budgets cut, they see the subject as expensive and expendable. The process was described as "slash and burn".

And it gets worse:

Most worrying of all was the discussion around City Learning Centres (CLCs). These were introduced in 2001 and they're purpose-built state of the art computer and multimedia suites. They're available for schools and businesses to use. The centres have equipment that many schools can't afford to buy, which makes it more cost effective because schools can collectively share the facilities available. Students can make use of Apple Macs, specialist software and equipment, industrial sized printers, video and radio equipment. This not only helps supplement the current IT curriculum, but is also available for extra-curricular, training and business use, which is much needed in disadvantaged areas.

I'm furious and I'm not even British. I have, however, for the last ten years made this country my home and I care deeply about its people and its future. If you happen to be British, you should be utterly livid. This move is a nuclear bomb dropped on Britain's digital future. It is a clear indication that the current government does not understand the value of digital literacy.

So what should we do?

ICT in its current form is broken. It is probably broken beyond repair. We are teaching kids secretarial skills, not digital literacy. If you want to put a kid off of computers, introduce them to computing with Microsoft Office. That is basically what we're going in ICT today and the results are a year-on-year drop in the number of kids taking GCSE ICT.

So this could be the perfect opportunity to replace ICT with something better. But that doesn't seem to be what the government is after.

The government's suggested solution is to ignore the problem and cut all funding for digital literacy altogether. They must hope that somehow – magically, perhaps – students will learn this stuff and we'll end up with a generation of digitally-literate producers (as opposed to merely consumers). With overworked teachers struggling to teach the curriculum as it currently stands, that's just not going to happen unless an instructor here or there goes out of her way to incorporate digital education into her class.

The answer should be to tackle the problem and fix it. Replace ICT with something better: with compulsory digital literacy classes in the core curriculum complimented by the introduction of digital literacy as a cross-cutting concern across the wider curriculum. And, while we're at it, let's support the use of open source solutions whenever possible in these classes. Lets teach kids concepts and provide them with solid foundations that they can apply to any platform in the future, be it open or proprietary, instead of training them in the specifics of using a certain proprietary technology.

Regardless of the specifics of the solution we replace ICT with, the last thing we should be doing is to cut funding for digital literacy. Quite on the contrary, we should be redoubling our efforts and our investment to fix it. Britain's digital future deserves no less.

What you can do today

• Read Anna's posts, Help keep ICT in our schools and Naace Curriculum Review Think Tank to get a better understanding about what's at stake and why this is important.
• Tell the government how you feel: the Department of Education has asked released a call for evidence on the National Curriculum Review
• Write to your MP

Comments

• Completely Agree with most of what you said here, great post for me ICT is currently broken despite the best efforts of the teachers. The digital landscape moves at such a rate it's hard to keep up so courses need to be more dynamic, reviewed often & focus on a range of skills we employ in todays industries. From my experience i've found that i'm learning from the student who are often more aware of the current practices than many who are employed to teach them. The focus for me should be teaching kids to innovate, think out of the box, problem solve for future problems coupled with coding languages, project management ,UX , design and theory. "If you're going to learn a language, think about coding. It's a language that talks to everyone."

  by andy on 2011-02-24 14:43:41

• This is just one destructive aspect of an Education Bill which seeks to re-cast the English education system in the form to whose fond memory the current Secretary of State for Education seems to cling... We MUST ensure that the consultation which was conspicuous by its absence BEFORE the White Paper came out is copiously compensated for by debate - and action - NOW! ICT, join MFL, Humanities, RS and the Arts in campaigning for the increasingly gaffe-prone Gove to be stopped in his tracks and for a real, national debate to be held before the Education system inflicts generational disaster on another cohort. And before anyone attacks this as a purely "lefty", ideologically-driven standpoint: NO! I would have Education (and Health) removed ENTIRELY from the 5-yearly, cyclical "political football match" which ensures that we can never truly establish the world-class educational system that our young people need. Phew. Rant over!

  by Alex Bellars on 2011-02-24 14:29:17

• I dont understand...why would such an important ICT course be axed? In todays world this is critical, as we all use facebook, networks, mobile phones....the list is endless. Some people really do need this, and it touches on IT itself making people feel "yeah i like it...an IT career is for me". But if they dont get that experience...well thats less people in IT, which is not good. The entire world always need good experienced IT techs and network enginners.

  by Paul on 2011-02-25 22:34:17

• Interesting post, but isn't it possible that if we're talking about digital 'literacy' the nature of learning in other subjects will require (or could embrace) some of this anyway? Also, It might be an idea if we knew what was meant by 'digital literacy' (the kind wanted rather than the kind that's being dumped?) as I suspect the definition varies greatly.

  by Phil Ruse on 2011-03-21 11:58:55

• Hmmm. I might have an odd experience as compared to others, but the sum total of my motivations for selection a career with computers had almost nothing to do with compulsory school. I don't come from a privileged background lavished with new computers and technology. Many of my favorite gifts as a child were homemade items. In fact, I didn't get into computers in reality until I was well into University. Here I am more than ten years later and I can say that what I have learned of computers has been from a personal investment either in terms of advanced education or within my career. Aral, if you are right about the lack of success in ITC (either in attendance or outcomes correlated with what had been learned), then it makes sense to cut back in a time when outgo exceeds income. We all seem to do this I believe. When our personal budgets run thin we sit around the dinner table and talk about where and what to cut back. The kids complain about how critical certain items are in their lives, but I believe this is simply because they don't pay the bills and they don't feel the need (yet) to make any cuts. Heaven forbid we do the same as educated adults living in an age of reason. Nobody ever got excited about cutting much of anything. And if you are doing the cutting, then surely there are plenty of people out there who will miss whatever is being cut. I can't imagine we are really thinking that cutting ITC truly removes a child's opportunity to gain a reasonable amount of exposure in a computer-saturated time in world history like this one.

  by steve on 2011-02-28 18:35:53

• Aral, ICT is far from dead in Schools. OCR Nationals in ICT is the third most popular course in England. The GCSE courses died out mostly through the utter boredom of the systems analyst approach. Nationals only have one unit using Office. However, instead of building upon it, a lot of ICT consultants and others joined on a bandwagon to diss Nationals and thwarted OCR's attempts to update them. Ironically they've mostly lost their jobs. I think they scored an own goal that played into Gove's hands.

  by John Hobson on 2011-02-24 17:34:42

• "The main problem cited was that the perception of the subject is very poor outside of the IT community. MPs don't think it's worth talking about, and schools see it as a tick in a box. Often, there's no real commitment to the subject in schools unless someone in senior leadership has an IT background." Yeah, right! Sounds like one of these decisions informed by personal beliefs instead of hard facts. Very different opinions can be found. "Not surprisingly, eight of the ten fastest growing occupations in the United States require digital literacy. Employers need workers who not only know how to obtain digital information, but can analyze, evaluate and apply what they find to solve everyday problems. Individuals who lack these skills have fewer employment opportunities. Furthermore, communities, states, and nations that fail to develop a digitally literate workforce will be far less competitive and economically stable." http://www.certiport.com/portal/common/documentlibrary/icrit_workforce_web.pdf

  by widged on 2011-02-25 03:30:29

• I also am not British, but since You live there I imagine that You would want them to cut as much as possible of everything so You would pay less taxes. Government programs are never very successful and efficient anyway.

  by Aleksandar on 2011-04-13 14:17:17