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A revolution is under way in the teaching of computer science in schools in England - but it risks leaving girls and pupils from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities behind. That's the conclusion of academics who've studied data about the move from ICT as a national curriculum subject to computer science.
Four years ago, amid general disquiet that ICT was teaching children little more than how Microsoft Office worked, the government took the subject off the national curriculum. The idea was that instead schools should move to offering more rigorous courses in computer science - children would learn to code rather than how to do PowerPoint.
But academics at Roehampton University, who compile an annual study of computing education, have some worrying news. First, just 28% of schools entered pupils for the GCSE in computing in 2015. At A-level, only 24% entered pupils for the qualification.
Then there's the evidence that girls just aren't being persuaded to take an interest - 16% of GCSE computing entrants in 2015 were female and the figure for the A-level was just 8.5% . The qualification is relatively new and more schools - and more girls, took it in 2016 - but female participation was still only 20% for the GCSE and 10% for the A-level.
Why is it girls are not attracted to computer science? Is it some deeply embedded gender bias, or something else?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @04:58AM
I agree that American-born women tend to be less interested in math and computer science, compared with their male classmates. However, this does not seem to hold true of women immigrating to America from Russia, India, or the Far East. Why not?
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday December 23 2016, @09:44AM
Among other things, I am responsible for computer science admissions at one of Cambridge's all-women colleges[1]. We often see more (competent) women applying from Romania than from England. Romania has roughly a third of the population of the UK, and applications from there are already self-selecting based on willingness to study abroad, do a degree in a foreign language, and even bother applying to a top international university.
The Romanian Baccalaureate actually has useful things on it for computer science (they learn some graph theory, some complexity theory, and so on), so they're exposed to the subject and there doesn't seem to be any stigma attached to being a girl interested in computers there. In contrast, one of my colleagues ran a masterclass for students interested in computer science in the UK and the first year they ran it they were around 90% male. They asked the schools why and were told, verbatim from more than one school 'girls can't code'. When the school teachers believe that girls can't do well in a subject, it's not surprising that they don't. They're not going to put effort into teaching the girls, because they 'know' that they won't do well anyway.
The new Computer Science GCSEs and A-levels are great in theory, but they're a problem for us. We have targets for the number of state school pupils that we have to admit. Normally this isn't a problem: state school pupils who apply to Cambridge tend to be intelligent, motivated, and without the sense of entitlement that a lot of the public school pupils come with. Unfortunately, most state schools aren't offering these courses (or, if they are, they're so badly taught that students are better off not studying them). In a couple of years, we're going to see students coming in with 4+ years of experience in the subject and others coming in with none. Trying to avoid socioeconomic bias in that world will be very hard.
[1] For those of you who aren't familiar the Oxford / Cambridge system: the university began as a loose aggregation of colleges. About 400 years ago, teaching sciences required labs that the colleges couldn't afford to maintain separately for a couple of students each, so they gradually centralised a lot of the teaching, but the college are still responsible for pastoral care and the small group teaching. You apply to a college, even though you're taught centrally by the university. Don't blame me, it made sense 800 years ago...
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