By Bob Harrison
Terry Freedman is an experienced ICT teacher and educator. He has supported many schools and colleges through the reform of the ICT curriculum in recent years.
My views on the Governments bungled efforts in the reform of the ICT national curriculum are well documented elsewhere and whilst the e book Terry has produced will be of enormous value for those ICT/Computing teachers desperately trying to find relevant qualifications for the differing needs of their learners it is not intended to resolve the bigger issues.
Something needs to change because after £100m investment we now have fewer pupils studying the subject, fewer girls studying the subject, fewer qualifications gained, fewer hours the subject is being taught and many teachers ill prepared to teach a new subject they have not been trained to teach.
The directory of qualifications will really help school leaders and teachers consider what alternatives there are to the rather academic and theoretical computer science qualifications currently promoted by government minister Nick Gibb who is desperate to protect his ebacc subject even to the extremes of refusing to consider an alternative IT/Digital qualification.
So the underlying problem still remains. We have a computing curriculum and suite of qualifications which neither meet the needs of all pupils nor the needs of a rapidly evolving digital workplace and world.
Whilst this helpful directory will be welcomed by most school leaders who are struggling to reconcile the needs of all learners and the current curriculum and qualifications available the deep rooted causes of the problem still needs to be addressed.
This ebook is available as a pdf at https://payhip.com/b/IWTR Please note that I sent Bob a free copy of the book, but that hasn’t affected the content of his review.
Bob Harrison is chair of governors of a school and a college, Chaired the DfE expert group of teachers established by the DfE to support the implementation of the computing curriculum. He is a judge for the BETT awards TESFE awards, Education Re-imagined awards, EdTech50, E-Assessment awards and is visiting assessor at Stanford Graduate School of Education. Follow him on twitter @bobharrisonedu