Almost 50% of 14-16 year olds in the UK are not being taught proper ICT skills (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/dec/14/secondary-schools-fail-teenagers-computing). Many important ICT skills are not taught or being taught by inadequate teachers who do not have the skills to teach ICT, reports the Guardian newspaper. This is an extremely alarming report for a country like the UK that forecasts a large demand in the ICT sector in the future. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created in ICT, but without proper training they will either be left vacant, filled by unqualified employees or foreign workers.
Essentially, most ICT teacher's in the UK have limited knowledge of any computing skill, especially computer programming. In some schools teachers lack the ability to even teach students to work with spread sheets. One startling fact was that the "quality of teaching in ICT are generally much better in primary schools than secondary’s," the study found. This is incredibly interesting as it is also true at my own secondary school.
This 3 year report comes at a time where computer programming skills and computer science programs are vitally important. Nevertheless, fewer and fewer students are taking the GSCE IT exam. There has been a decline of nearly 40,000 students over the past 4 years. This is extremely discouraging news as ICT is one of the strongest sectors of the job market.
ICT business’s in the UK will just have to look abroad to fill the jobs that many British people are not qualified to do.
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ReplyDeleteNo breaking news, but indeed very interesting, Joe! I can see the limited knowledge of computing skills in my own school as well. Very few teachers use computers in their lessons and I was extremely surprised last year when I noticed that some of the (even young!) colleagues don’t know how to work with excel. On top of that, our ICT teacher – with all respect for the work she’s doing – even isn’t informatician. I certainly can’t generalize my own experience but ICT school policies often are not well developed and I think that we have to focus on the professional development of the ICT skills of (ICT) teachers. We should encourage all teachers to use ICT in the classroom and support them with adequate workshops for example.
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