Dick Sblog

Last week I attended a consultation meeting held by e-Skills UK to look at issues relating to the ICT GCSE curriculum. The participants were a mix of awarding bodies and businesses – most of the latter were big corporates. I’m part of a two person company.  The focus of the meeting was about engaging businesses with the curriculum and vice versa, particularly in the context of the new ‘controlled assessment’ component of the curriculum. Apparently this is a sort of cross between coursework and a test, for example, students being given a task to do, over a period of several days whilst under the supervision of a teacher.

Now, I thought about this a fair bit before attending and afterwards and here’s a few observations:

We shouldn’t teach ‘ICT’ much beyond KS2. After that it should be embedded in subject teaching and other school activities

(Unfortunately, our kids are increasingly ‘digital natives’, whilst the majority of those with influence (heads, senior teachers, awarding body staff, politicians etc etc) are completely the opposite; so this is highly unlikely for a few years).

A good investment would be to give all kids a high-end laptop, not simply a browser device. They’ll use it to its full capacity doing all sorts of stuff, whereas the majority of older types hardly know where to start.

Project activities should be collaborative to reflect the needs of business and research. For this to happen we need to devote effort to identifying methodologies for assessing individuals’ performance within teams. Focussing assessment on what individuals can do whilst working entirely on their own no longer reflects reality in the real world (if it ever did).

We need to teach the skills of teamwork and project management more systematically. Differentiation isn’t just about kids having different learning styles, it’s also about individuals contributing in different ways to different tasks. We all need to understand our strengths and weaknesses in this respect so that we can be maximally productive in any newly constituted team or working on a new challenge.

To get kids enthusiastic about working in the IT industry (one of e-Skills objectives) involves getting them to do interesting things, not repetetive standardised tasks.

So the idea of controlled assessment being able to offer the chance to work on real business problems is good… Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that rather than define a set of criteria for what would make a suitable problem, thus enabling schools to use their local businesses to define an issue that’s current,  the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will want to ‘own’ a set of problems that can be used for assessment. (This, to me, is a bit like saying that because a meal of fresh food is appealing on day one, it’ll still be appealing a year later). Oh yes, and of course it will all be individually based assessment.