Draft National Curriculum Programmes of Study - My Response

April the 16th is the deadline for responses to the Draft National Curriculum Programmes of Study. Much has been written and said about the creation of the Computing nee ICT programme of study and it’s creation process. I’ve written myself around the topic a number of times over it’s journey from the Nesta report to our decision to start a Computing GCSE back in 2011 (feeling pretty smug about that decision!) to the diss-application of the old PoS to our new KS3 curriculum.

Really I should respond to the proposals, so here in the interest of sharing and discussing are my (personal) responses to the official consultation. I’ll try my best to avoid the politics and keep our young people and their futures at the heart of this response.

The response below largely refers to Computing/ICT, much as I could be tempted into discussing other subjects.

1.Do you have any comments on the proposed aims for the National Curriculum as a whole as set out in the framework document?

It is sad to see English education being reduced to “core knowledge”. There is a real danger that an overly prescriptive curriculum, based on too much core knowledge, combined with the ongoing pressures of league tables and Ofsted will lead many weaker teachers and schools to cramming facts into our young learners. Will this develop the skills and competencies for future learning and work that they will require? I don’t think so. I’ll never argue that learning times tables and other key pieces of knowledge are crucial, but that’s not al there is to education is it?

2.Do you agree that instead of detailed subject-level aims we should free teachers to shape their own curriculum aims based on the content in the programmes of study?

In principal yes. But where there are extensive changes, the Computing curriculum being the most obvious, it is important that sufficient support is available for schools and teachers to create effective curricula.

3.Do you have any comments on the content set out in the draft programmes of study?

The Computing programme of study is a massive change from ICT. I’m in support of replacing much of the old PoS, as is evident in much of my previous writing. Programming and a more detailed understanding of how computers work is important.

The PoS that has been proposed seems to be heavily weighted towards Computing/Computer Science, at the expense of creative pursuits and digital literacy. Whilst they are clearly left in the final two points of the KS3 PoS, they seem to have been left in as an afterthought. Whether that’s the intention, it is certainly the appearance that is given.

Some of the Computer Science points are somewhat extreme. I’m not at all convinced that all 13 year olds need to understand 2 sorting algorithms and two searching algorithms, and I’m quite convinced that they do not need to be able to represent text or images in binary by hand! There is plenty of time for those students who wish to continue with Computing at GCSE level to pick up these more detailed skills at this point.

For those who will not work in the IT industry or go on to develop their programming skills in more detail this proposed PoS does not offer enough opportunities for learners to develop their skills of safely, creatively using IT to solve problems, something that every one of them will need to be able to do for the rest of their life.

4.Does the content set out in the draft programmes of study represent a sufficiently ambitious level of challenge for pupils at each key stage?

See answer to section 3.

5.Do you have any comments on the proposed wording of the attainment targets?

See answer to section 3.

6.Do you agree that the draft programmes of study provide for effective progression between the key stages?

Progression in knowledge maybe. But it is very unclear how this progression is to be measured. I’m no huge fan of National Curriculum levels as can be seen in our research work on Badges for assessment. But they have certainly served a purpose, particularly in core subjects. If we are still to be measured on the levels of progress from KS2 to KS3 and KS2 to KS4 then what will these measures be based upon? It’s not even clear if KS2 levels will continue within core subjects - but that’s a whole different conversation. As ASCL’s quality response suggests, educators are more than capable of replacing NC Levels with something better, but again we need the time and collaboration opportunities to develop these. The complete lack of clarity in this area is of real concern.

7.Do you agree that we should change the subject information and communication technology to computing to reflect the content of the new programmes of study?

What’s in a name? I have no issues with the change to ‘Computing’. Politics and policies have muddied the name of ICT so a change can’t do much harm.

8.Does the new National Curriculum embody an expectation of higher standards for all children?

If standards are measured in facts committed to memory by a certain age then yes. If standards mean skills for lifelong learning, and knowledge and understanding that develops at different rates for different learners, then I’m not sure it does.

9.What impact - either positive or negative - will our proposals have on the ‘protected characteristic’ groups.

There is significant danger that learners from protected characteristic groups will be turned off the use of IT in their future lives. The heavy focus on Computer Science will be a considerable learning challenge for them. Combined with the issues of delivering these (see subsequent comments on CPD) effectively they may well fail to progress in Computing, quickly become disaffected with the subject and leave school without basic digital literacies that they will need to access employment.

10.To what extent will the new National Curriculum make clear to parents what their children should be learning at each stage of their education?

The majority of parents will have little or no idea what the majority of the Computing points mean.

As far as clarifying which facts should be known by what age things should be relatively clear. Does that explain what students should actually be learning and how?

11.What key factors will affect schools’ ability to implement the new National Curriculum successfully from September 2014?

Three key factors put the success of the proposed KS3/4 PoS for Computing at huge risk of failure:

The content, as detailed in previous responses, risks turning many learners off the subject of Computing. Unless they are delivered with skills which leads on to…

Staff training:

Most schools in England will not be able to deliver the KS3 (&KS4) Computing programme of study from September 2014 without a massive investment in training. Our school has a talented ICT department however we consist of a Maths teacher, a Business Studies teacher and an unqualified ICT teacher (who fortunately understands programming). This is not atypical. I do not know the percentage of teachers teaching ICT at present who have degrees in Computer Science, or who can program, but I would estimate it at around 10%. That leaves approximately 90% of the ICT teaching workforce who do not know the content proposed in the PoS.

To teach well and deliver difficult concepts to students at an early age it is vital that teachers are experts in the field, that they have a deep understanding of the subject matter and hopefully experience of teaching it. This is all missing at present.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) demands to deliver this PoS at all, let alone by September 2014 will be huge. Most ICT teachers will need to learn to the concepts behind programming, then learn a programming language, and then will need to learn how to teach that knowledge effectively. That’s hundreds of hours of training for most staff. Most teachers will receive around 25 hours of CPD a year on average. CPD budgets in schools are falling in line with overall falls in school budgets under the current government.

Where will the CPD programmes to support this proposed PoS come from? Who will fund them? Who will fund the supply cover required to back fill staff while they are out on this training?

All at once: Surely it would be sensible to stagger the introduction of the new curriculum. We will be elected to teach KS3 students this curriculum, which is very different from previously, despite those same students not having been exposed to any of the new Computing knowledge in the new KS3 curriculum. Are we to play catch up with everything that they would have learned in KS2 had this been introduced bit by bit?

12.Who is best placed to support schools and/or develop resources that schools will need to teach the new National Curriculum?

Local Authorities? Nope! Becta? Ha! Vital? Oops! Teaching Schools? Not sure the majority of them have Computer Science teams!

Joking aside, this is an issue. Following the issues over the drafting of the PoS are the relationships between the likes of Naace & BCS strong enough to develop the required support together? There will be plenty of people rubbing their hands with glee and offering expensive training courses and pre-packaged schemes of work for schools at a cost. Will these be tailored to the individual schools? Of course not.

The people best placed to support schools and develop resources are the teachers themselves. There is great creativity, ingenuity, dedication, skill and enthusiasm in the current ICT teaching community. Those with the Computer Science / programming skills will be all too happy to help. This has been seen for the past 7 years or so on Twitter and across teacher blogs. There is only so much work that these volunteers can do in their spare time, could funding be sought to allow them the time and space to collaborate. The Primary National Curriculum for Computing in ITT Expert Group’s work at Primary level is a great example of what needs to be started at KS3.

13.Do you agree that we should amend the legislation to diss-apply the National Curriculum programmes of study, attainment targets and statutory assessment arrangements, as set out in section 12 of the consultation document?

Really not sure about this. What will Ofsted be looking for in classrooms in this ‘fallow’ year? Is this just a sneaky way of introducing the new PoS’s a year early?

Summary

I’m not against the proposals. A balanced increase in Computer Science and a bringing up to date of the other areas of the old ICT curriculum are well overdue. However the proposals that have been produced do seem to be overly weighted towards Computer Science, based on what evidence and research is unclear. If this PoS is to go ahead then there are huge issues with it’s successful implementation in the proposed timescales. The creation of this document to this point has not brought the communities together and has left teachers in particular feeling completely left out of the process.

Letter Rush is yet another word game for iOS devices. I’m looking forward to trying this out with learners at school next week. The twist is that the words that need spelling are provided for you, you then make them from the word grid as quickly as you can. Games like Letterpress or Wordtower where the player has to come up with words themselves often turn off students with weaker literacy skills, their lack of vocabulary makes the games too difficult. If they don’t feel like they’re doing we’ll they’ll quickly turn back to Minecraft!

1. Lots of people will do small-scale innovative projects with no funding or resources, because they love trying new things and doing awesome stuff.
2. Some companies or institutions will “invent” or “discover” something that one or more of these people have been doing, and it will be branded as their own.
3. This branded “innovation” will become co-opted and corrupted, so that it doesn’t really do anything innovative, or anything other than building the reputation of the “innovators”.
4. People will hype the crap out of the “innovation” as The Future of Education, and The Saviour (or Disruption) of Universities, and present it at conferences and write papers and travel the presentation circuit explaining it to the masses.
5. The people from 1. will largely ignore the hype, shrug their shoulders, and continue doing awesome stuff because they enjoy doing awesome stuff.

Don’t like to repost practically a whole blog post, but Darcy Norman’s EdTech predictions for 2013 hit a chord!

Would add in the middle:

3b) People fail to realise why this innovation worked so well in the specific learning environment it was originally designed for in 1. and claim it works brilliantly for them when in reality it probably doesn’t.

Source: darcynorman.net

Our New ICT Curriculum #ICTCurric

Probably worth reading my last post about the disapplication of the previous ICT Program of Study and our plans to take it’s place at KS3 before proceeding with this one.

So what have we done in the 4 months since my last post?

Our fabulous ICT Department have thrashed out what we believe to be the key elements of an ICT curriculum for 2012. Taking inspiration from many places (again see the last post) we’ve come up with a core set of topics which we believe will support our learners in accessing our two KS4 qualifications if they decide to do so in the future (GCSE Computing & Creative iMedia), whilst giving them the digital skills and literacies that we believe they will need to be successful in all areas of their future learning and work.

Our core topics are:

  • Living Online
  • Publishing Online
  • Formal Digital Communications
  • Researching Online
  • Digital Presenting
  • Visual Programming & Control
  • Text Based Programming
  • Handling Digital Data
  • Digital Imaging
  • Digital Video
  • Digital Sound
  • Project Planning
  • Project Evaluation

We’ve decided to call our new curriculum ‘ICT’ - after much debate we decided it still fits the job nicely!

We’ve also throughly embraced the idea of using badges to reward and assess progress. We’re fortunate that I’m also responsible for data and assessment at our school so I’ve kindly given us permission to scrap National Curriculum levels entirely for KS3 ICT. In their place come our Badges, these will eventually be in Bronze, Silver & Gold levels for each topic. It’s an interesting experiment but we really believe that knowing you’ve achieved a Silver Award in Digital Presentation and a Bronze Award in Living Online will mean far more to learner and parent than being told they are working at a 4b. Time will tell.

We have been carefully constructing the learning objectives / learning outcomes for the badges and learners have been collating their evidence towards these using Realsmart rPassports. They’re being awarded on Edmodo for now, eventually we hope to use the full Mozilla Open Badges framework.

To give you a feel for these here’s one objective from the Living Online badge:

I can use social networks safely because I have:

  • reviewed the security and safety settings of my social networks
  • analysed my contacts and ensured that they are appropriate and can see only what I want them to
  • discussed the potential dangers of social networking, highlighting typical signs of danger
  • described how to report suspicious or abusive behaviour that I might encounter online
  • chosen the right social network for the right communications and interactions

Please feel free to see more detail on our wiki and feel free to offer your comments here. It’s very much a work in progress, we’ve got a framework in the background and are trying to keep a half term ahead of ourselves throughout the year.

It’s interesting to note that since this whole adventure started with Mr Gove’s original invitation to ICT teachers to embrace this new found freedom, he has since decided to retract that and come up with a new program of study, as far as I can tell behind closed doors from the very educators he encouraged to take up the mantle. Hopefully it will bear much resemblance to what we’re doing here. If not we’ll probably carry on with what we feel is right any way.

So far it’s been a really enjoyable start to the year. Staff have been enjoying teaching relevant skills and literacies to the students and they are getting the hang of badges. As we start awarding the first badges over the next week or so I am confident it’s going to really take off. I’m also really positive that when we get onto the likes of Digital Presentation we’re going to start seeing students using lots of evidence from other subjects to support their badges. I hope that this in turn becomes a nice guide to staff in other departments as to the actual ICT skills of our learners. With my Maths teacher head on I think it would be great to be able to look at a glance at the specific skills of my class and know in advance if they have experience of managing data or doing basic programming. Historically other teachers wouldn’t really have a clue as to the ICT skills of a student, making integrating ICT in other subjects more difficult.

Exciting times :)

XKCD - A History Of The United States Congress. Once again Randall Munroe shows himself to be the undisputed king of the info-graphic (previous favourite used in many a maths lesson). My knowledge of American history is poor, this in fascinating and informative and does an amazing job to pile an entire modern nation’s political history into one diagram.
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XKCD - A History Of The United States Congress.

Once again Randall Munroe shows himself to be the undisputed king of the info-graphic (previous favourite used in many a maths lesson). My knowledge of American history is poor, this in fascinating and informative and does an amazing job to pile an entire modern nation’s political history into one diagram.

Source: xkcd.com

Fizz Buzz Scratch

The title sounds like a nasty affliction - but I actually want to describe a great lesson!

I was looking for a nice challenge for my Year 9 Computing class to continue developing their understanding of variables, if statements and loops - ideally moving on to nested statements and loops.

As ever Twitter came to the rescue when politely asked.

FizzBuzz was a great idea, having already built a program myself this year on Codecademy I knew it could step nicely through the required skills and work fine in Scratch.

I decided to break this into 4 challenges so that I could scaffold the learning a little for the group, their challenge was to :

  1. Build a program that asked for an input number and then either repeated the number or said ‘Fizz’ if it was a multiple of 3.
  2. Extend so that multiples of 5 reply ‘Buzz’.
  3. Extend so that multiples of 3 and 5 return ‘FizzBuzz!’
  4. Change program so that rather than returning just one value it counts up from 1 to a user inputted number.

This turned out to work really well - particularly part 3. Students tended to duplicate code and check sequentially for the different multiples. Meaning that an entry of 15 would often output all three responses. When I pushed students to adapt their program to return just ‘FizzBuzz’ in this case they began to think in depth about how their If then Else statements worked and to experiment with nesting the statements. Finally part for introduced loops to their previous work.

By then end students had a great understanding of how and why you would nest statements and a much better idea of when a program would cease based on a True If statement and when it would continue.

Here’s an example of a finished Scratch program:

Fizz Buzz Scratch Code

Next steps for this class are to do this all again but with some real code this time. We’re going to work through the Javascript Fundamentals course on www.codecademy.com and tackle the Fizz Buzz challenge there. That will pretty much wrap up their taster of GCSE Computing - hopefully it’ll have some of them hooked and they’ll choose to take the course in Year 10.

Computing meet Maths meet Scratch, Maths meet Scratch meet Computing

I have the pleasure of teaching two great Year 9 classes this year. One is a fabulous Maths group that I have taught for the past two years, another is an ICT taster class (we have brought taster options into Year 9 this year, allowing students to get a taster of KS4 courses - this group is doing a few months of Computing and a few months of Creative iMedia).

To introduce the concepts of variables, if statements and loops in the Computing class we’ve been working with Scratch. We already use Scratch in Y7/8 to cover some of the control aspects of the old curriculum. This normally takes the form of a simple maze game. 

Being the Mathematician that I am some simple Maths challenges seemed like a good place to start. We’ve created a times table machine that lists the first 10 numbers in any times table and a host of other challenges that a colleague of mine wrote.

This week I set them the challenge of writing a program that found all the factors of a number. This used the mod function to check for a remainder when dividing, a loop an if statement and a list (Scratch’s 1 dimensional array) to store the answers in.

Here’s an example of what this looked like:

Scratch Factors Program

This worked so well I realised that this was a great way to teach Maths too! Coming up with a solution to this problem really gets to the bottom of what a factor is and how you can calculate it.

With this in mind I took advantage of a double lesson with my Maths group to very quickly teach them the basics that we’d covered in Computing and set them the same challenge. We also then moved onto checking whether the number was a prime (by checking the number of factors in the final list, if = 2 then it’s a prime). We left the class discussing whether it would be possible to make Scratch calculate the Highest Common Factor of two inputs. I wasn’t sure if it was up to it, but a little work at home and I’ve managed to make it work: 

Scratch Highest Common Factor Program

I was pretty proud of myself. I plan to set this little challenge to the class this week as a homework and see if anyone can come up with a solution. It’s probably more of a programming challenge than a Maths challenge but either way I think it’s a great little challenge and I’m continually impressed with the flexibility and scope of Scratch.

I’m particularly excited to see what Scratch 2.0 has in store for us.

I’ve used Scratch years ago as a LOGO replacement in Maths too, writing a program to draw regular polygons is a great challenge to develop an understanding of internal/external angles.

With this in mind I’m planning to teach at least one topic each half term this year using Scratch with my Maths class.

As for the Computing group, next challenge was a game of FizzBuzz, more on that in a future post.

If you’d like to download and play with the Scratch programs mentioned then click to download:

Factors Tables CommonFactors

What Maths have you taught via programming tasks? Ideas and examples would be most welcome in the comments!

Guided Access is a great new accessibility feature on the iPad that allows you to lock an iPad (or other iOS device) into one application and even restrict which parts of the screen can be interacted with.

Some of our staff have been concerned about handing their iPads over to learners, conscious that their confidential emails etc are also accessible, this is a pretty great solution to that.

parislemon:

What it looks like to descend to Mars. In color, no less.

(via Seldo)

Incredible really. Amazing what a bit of Science and Maths can achieve.

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