More money for computing -- but how much?

January 23, 2018

Yesterday at the Education World Forum, Damian Hinds, the recently-appointed Secretary of State for Education in England, announced that the Government were committing £84 billion for training Computer Science teachers. Good news indeed.

However, back in the autumn, Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, announced that there would be £84 million available -- for the training of GCSE Computer Science teachers, as I reported in Digital Education in December.

So, a bit of a discrepancy there in the figures, by a factor of a thousand. And a discrepancy in terms of the target spending: teachers in all types of school, or only secondary?

So, great news that there's going to be more money, it's just not quite clear, to me at any rate, how much.

Recent book reviews

Review: Power Up, by Matthew Lane

This book looks at the maths concepts — and, to some extent, the physics concepts — hidden in popular video games.

Review: The Shortest History of AI

How is it that ChatGPT, Claude and other Al models appear to perform so well at certain complex tasks that some people become convinced that they're sentient — only for them to then promptly fail at simple tasks that even a child could handle?

Review: Teacher Geek

Every so often I like to take a look, or another look, at a book published a while ago, and today I’ve been looking at Teacher Geek, by Rachel Jones.

Review: Teach Fast

The book contains some interesting ideas.

A question of leadership

I have somewhat dichotomous views of this question of whether leaders make a difference, or much of a difference. I think my views can be classified as macro and micro.