The UK's attitude to computer education needs a reboot - The Guardian (blog)

An ICT lesson at the Anglo European school in Ingatestone, Essex. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

In schoolrooms across the country, pupils have long learned how to use Word, and Excel, and how to make Powerpoint presentations during ICT classes. This is akin to teaching a generation of aspiring chefs how to shop at Tesco. Programming and web design – the ability to create websites and computer programs from scratch – is still deemed an extra-curricular hobby, to be picked up at one's own inclination. This is absurd.

Those who regard programming as an niche, esoteric endeavour are wrong. Just as PE teaches teamwork and perseverance as a byproduct of the sport itself, coding espouses the principles of logic and problem-solving. You may never use the HTML, CSS or JavaScript that coding lessons would teach you, but the mental exercise is unquestionably good. Either way, in an education system increasingly looking to arm its students with more vocational and tangible skills, coding seems like a significantly more useful pursuit than English literature.

It's also a fundamentally creative skill; ideal for idea-mongerers. I learned how to code on a 10-week course, and found myself addicted – I began imagining football formations as HTML layers, and once woke up at 4am to shift a box five pixels to the right. The ability to have an idea, and then build it myself, rather than nagging (or paying) developer friends into submission is one of the most empowering things I've ever learned.

Within the UK's rapidly growing digital industries, demand for developers is always high, yet the supply is perpetually low. Startups across London struggle to recruit developers they can afford, and growing companies spend months trying to expand their technology teams – many developers choose to remain freelance, charging up to £1,000 a day to clients, because they know how desperately they're needed.

They need competition, but it isn't coming through. While the government pumps money and rhetoric into stimulus initiatives like Tech City, optimistically heralded by David Cameron as London's answer to Silicon Valley, the digital foot soldiers of the future are being neglected.

As one 13-year-old pupil at a high-performing school told me: "ICT is one of those classes that you don't really do much in. Last year we had one class per fortnight, but no one really takes it seriously." He struggled to remember anything he had learned he previous term, but recalled being shown how to fiddle around with images on Photoshop.

This isn't surprising. A study last year revealed that only a third of secondary schools achieved a good or outstanding ICT report from Ofsted. I asked the 13-year-old if he even knew what programming was. He didn't.

While the UK's ICT education seems largely outdated, other countries are taking bold steps to inject basic programming into the earliest stages of state education. An initiative begins this month in Estonia training primary school teachers to teach basic web and mobile application to children as young as six.

Here, we are taught from an early age to be technologically lazy, trained to assume that someone else has already built the tools for you to work with.

This shortfall begins in primary school, according to Laura Kirsop, a key stage 2 teacher at Soho Parish Primary school. "On the whole, most schools skip a lot of the interesting stuff and focus on showing kids how to use a word processor, and how to surf the web safely. They are taught how to consume, rather than how to create."

Soho Parish is one of a rapidly growing number of schools to have signed up to Code Club, a network of volunteer-led after-school coding clubs for children aged 9-11, now operating at 174 schools across the country with a further 250 on their waiting list, despite only launching in April this year. The clubs teach children the basic principles of programming using Scratch, a drag-and-drop interface that arranges chunks of code to construct basic games. "The pickup has been rapid, but it's weird that we have to do this at all really, it should all be part of the curriculum," says co-founder Clare Sutcliffe, "Essentially, we're a bandage – a bridge until a proper new curriculum appears."

Most aspirant technologists don't realise what they don't know until later in life, and then scramble to make up for it. At General Assembly, a digital education campus in London, business is booming. Their adult courses on coding, wireframing, user experience and other digital staples have been full since they opened their first UK office in April. Up the road, at another digital tutoring company, day-long coding courses are flying off the shelves, at over £780 a pop.

Their success is cashing in on the UK's digital illiteracy, born of decades of being taught how to use software, rather than being taught how to build it.

The appetite is there. The industrial demand is there. But the curriculum isn't, and neither is the leadership. This month, the government scrapped the existing ICT curriculum, leaving schools with a two-year gap in guidance until a new, "more challenging" curriculum is introduced in 2014. Without any proper assessment, many will drop it altogether.

Early indications suggest that the re-imagined curriculum will include more computer science, but will be considerably shorter, "to allow for innovation". Translation: we'll stitch up the basics, and you can do the rest. This isn't good enough.

If the UK wishes to compete with Silicon Valley and the growing tech hubs in India and China, we must teach our children to get their hands dirty, early on, rather than relying on volunteers and educational startups to plug the gap. This won't happen if we persist in teaching them how to use a word processor, rather than build one.