• Teaching ICT & Enterprise across key stages 3 to 5
• Leading the ICT department
• One day’s outreach per week in the primary schools to advise on ICT curriculum
• Training & mentoring for trainee teachers
• Teaching & learning coaching for colleagues

Anyone who knows me will understand when reading that list just how much of a ball I’m having here, but this is just context for the crux of this blog post. ICT on St Helena is focused entirely on computer skills, with little focus beyond that on application, evaluation (or any other higher-order thinking skills) until students reach A level. The primary school curriculum is outdated, isolates ICT rather than encouraging cross-curricular links, and doesn’t make assessing progress easy. There are no ICT specialists in the primary schools, but those teaching ICT are keen to improve the subject.

At Key Stage 3, we follow the traditional model of a unit on spreadsheets, followed by one on databases, followed by another on Scratch, yet APP has been introduced as a method of assessment. This is a nigh on impossible fit when entire terms can be spent in one Assessment Focus, and has led to some peculiar blips on tracking spreadsheets, where in term 1 a student achieved a level 4b, then in term 2 the student achieved a level 3a – he happened to be very comfortable with the desktop publishing unit in term 1, but struggled with the database unit in term 2. As a result, I’m going to be leading a curriculum review from Key Stage 1 right the way through to introducing new qualifications at GCSE & A level, where currently the only options are IGCSE ICT and AQA A level ICT – both tough options for students with low literacy, as many have. So at the moment I have a blank sheet of paper and a mountain of background reading, including the fine work of people like Brian Sharland & Chris Leach.

Having sat down with the department we decided we like APP, and will likely use that format as our rubric for assessment, but I like others in the #ictcurric movement feel the three existing strands don’t encourage creation of content, rather than mere consumption. Fundamentals of any curriculum are likely to be literacy and critical thinking, and these are desperately needed here on St Helena, as the students though exceptionally quick-witted struggle to work through a problem independently, or apply their own knowledge beyond the confines of that lesson in order to progress.

I recently enjoyed reading Computing At School’s computing curriculum, and fully intend to apply some of the concepts in the primary schools, eventually working up through to KS3. Anything we develop here hasto be a curriculum that fits for St Helena – dropping in the National Curriculum and expecting it to work has been tried before, and I feel confident in saying part of the failure was a complete lack of ownership on the part of the teachers then asked to deliver it. I hope through a series of INSET sessions with the high school and primary staff to develop our own assessment rubric – tentatively with the four strands being:

1. Finding
2. Using
3. Presenting
4. Creating

Heavy emphasis will be placed on critical thinking throughout, not just from level 4 up (being wary of bias in strand 1, considering target audience in strand 3, etc). Projects will be designed around a central theme with enough breadth to cover 3 strands on average, with each project having a selection of level descriptors included in the teaching materials to allow for easy assessment & negating the need for baseline testing in year 7 as we will feel far more confident in levels given at primary school.

Transition should not be an exercise that straddles years 6 & 7, but should start in year 1 with sights set firmly on year 11.

Stay tuned for more updates!

I tend not to leave required reading to take in one of my posts, but this LA Times article by teacher Ellie Herman had me nodding my head and scratching it in equal measure. While the settings of our respective classrooms are very different, there are many things in Ellie’s classroom that we will all have experienced – the keen student with additional needs so significant that they preclude him understanding the notes he so dutifully takes down, the students suffering as a result of poverty, the angry ADD-fuelled (or Ritalin-addled) kid… they’re in my classroom too.

The general feeling in my former staff room was that the incredible melting pots that are modern classrooms are becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to the huge amount of variety in our students that was either not present, or not identified, in decades past. Teaching is becoming harder, and there seem to be no signs of it stopping.

A couple of months ago, we had an excellent bit of INSET training on the topic of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome – well worth reading up on for anyone who hasn’t heard of it, but here are the Cliffs Notes:

• When a woman drinks during pregnancy it can cause significant problems in the development of the baby.
• The amount of alcohol does not matter, nor does the point during the term of pregnancy.
• As a result, some women are unaware they are pregnant and continue drinking.
• The main effect of FAS is damage to the central nervous system – especially the brain.

This isn’t a particularly new condition, but only in the last ten years have significant numbers of children with the condition survived early infancy. As a result these children are now filtering through into our high schools, adding to the already simmering pot mentioned above. The issues caused by FAS can manifest as lack of impulse control, retention of memory, and inability to focus, and like autism, FAS is a spectrum disorder that can range from mild to serious.

We live in complex times, with few simple problems, and yet we as the professional at the front of the classroom are expected to be the ones with the answers. Armed only with a data sheet that may (though may not) have more detail than the occasional scant word or acronym – SA, SA+, STAT, EAL, BEH – isn’t hugely helpful.Also, FAS and other developmental syndromes including autism, Asperger’s and others do sometimes go undiagnosed, so we are also to be on the look out for students with problems that haven’t yet been identified.

Okay, so I realise I started out with reference to an article entitled “the myth of the extraordinary teacher”, and now I’m talking about special educational needs, but my point is twofold:

1. Teaching is hard. Anyone who claims anything different either doesn’t know enough to form that kind of opinion, or aren’t particularly good at it. It’s a constant balancing act, rarely with fewer than 25 variables sat before you, plus pressure from different sides when it comes to measuring outcomes of whatever stripe.
2. In answer to the original article, I don’t believe these settings do preclude excellence. We perhaps have to alter our definition of the word – academic excellence is not the only kind, after all.

Measuring time, by aussiegall on Flickr

Quantifying success

In order to gauge the relative success or failure of anything – a movie, a car, or a school – the first step is to select an appropriate yardstick. None of these three examples can be definitively compared with other movies, cars or schools using one criteria alone. Using box office takings alone would place Avatar comfortably at the top of the list, while The Shawshank Redemption & The Godfather share the top spot on IMDb’s Top 250 chart (Avatar rolls in a little later at #184). Low fuel consumption may be a perfectly reasonable criteria in the desirability of a family car, but is unlikely to be at the top of the list of priorities for a Formula 1 team. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on the idea that quantifying & measuring the relative success or failure of a school, or a teacher, is any simpler than either of these examples.

I used to teach a truly exceptional boy with Asperger’s syndrome whose fixation was politics, but for him at that time the sum total of politics was contained in the history of the Labour party from the 1960s onwards. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert when it comes to politics, but I knew enough to have some incredibly entertaining arguments with this young man who put every bit of his highly-specialised knowledge to good use. After a few conversations I wanted to see how well he could write, so I asked him once to write me an op ed piece on anything he liked. Approximately 500 words, on any topic provided he cared enough about it to form a compelling argument.

He came back to me a couple of days later with a short essay on the unfair system of education in the UK entitled “An argument in favour of abolishing British grammar schools”. As the benefactor of a grammar school education myself, I was delighted with the topic. I went off to read it, scrawling notes in the margins ready to lock horns with him when we next met. In this extremely well-written but entirely one-sided diatribe, he explained that wealth was no basis of selection for an education, and that rather than having a selection of centres for academic excellence scattered around the country, the focus of the government should be on encouraging the same standard throughout.

We talked at some length about how his argument had some flaws, not least of which was the fact he himself went to a highly successful academically-focused high school (a former grammar school itself) based largely on his postcode, which just happened to be located well within the leafy suburb of the catchment area – a postcode his parents secured through buying a house well beyond the means of many others, while I secured a spot in a grammar school not based on the personal wealth of my parents but my performance in an entrance exam, but the point is this: the government, both national and local, is measuring the success of schools in the same terms as a then-15-year-old boy talking only from his personal experience of education.

When I compare him to our current Secretary of State for Education, I at least feel confident that the boy has expanded upon his ideas since leaving school. With Michael Gove, I’m not so sure…

A good friend of mine works in a Pupil Referral Unit, the success of which is measured using exactly the same measure as my former school – the percentage of students achieving 5 A*-C grades at GCSE. To provide some context, the students at this PRU have been permanently excluded from at least two high schools. The traditional educational system hasn’t worked for them – twice. So why then is the last resort being expected to operate in the same way as these schools? Last year, of the 11 final year leavers, every single one of them is now either attending college or in employment.

That is a huge achievement, and a testament to the hard work going on there – they take persistent non-attenders, students with alcohol and drug problems, and often histories of violence, and educate them. Not merely walk them through qualifications and present them with a handful of certificates at the end, but teach them how to function in a world they haven’t yet managed to be a part of.

Success like this rarely happens in education. Ramparts should be added to the school building purely to allow the staff and students to trumpet their extraordinary success from them. However, the staff of this unit, and many like it around the country, have been repeatedly told that under the new Ofsted criteria they cannot be graded as anything other than satisfactory. Adequate. Passable.

Talk about a vote of confidence.

How can we be great when we don’t know what great is?

I was recently asked to be host to two enthusiastic trainee teachers who were in school for a taste of what teaching is all about, and by the end of the day I feel fairly confident that they had had as comprehensive an experience as could be expected – they were whisked from lesson to lesson with barely chance to catch their breath, they had an undue burden placed upon them by an assistant head (to corral year 7 students at the sports day in the afternoon,) had just enough time over coffee in the staffroom to complain that that wasn’t what they were here for, and were saved from it by a colleague who due to his new job no longer cared about annoying SLT. Cough.

At the end of the day, we sat for a couple of hours discussing what it was to be a good teacher. I was surprised to hear that while mine wasn’t their first placement school, they hadn’t yet seen an enthusiastic teacher – the teaching they had seen thus far had been largely “Right, carry on with coursework,” with very little further input. That wasn’t quite the experience they had with me, though I don’t usually end my lessons with a Lady Gaga song. Honest.

I remember Googling to find answers to the question “what are the qualities of a great teacher?” when I was training for part of an assignment. There are so many bullet-point lists, PowerPoint presentations and webpages on the topic, but none of them can sufficiently answer the question because of that difficult quantifier – Great. Extraordinary. Exceptional. Outstanding.

Okay, maybe not the last one, but the others are incredibly difficult to quantify, describe or explain by using anything other than excessive hand actions and descriptive terms like je ne sais quoi. For any new teachers looking for advice, I can’t help you beyond this:

A great teacher is first a good teacher, and a good teacher is first an adequate teacher. Look at the standards for an exhaustive list of the kinds of things you should be aiming for, but I’d boil it down to knowledge, communication, relationships, versatility & resilience.

Everyone has to have the first two under their belt, but the standards only go so far as to describe subject knowledge. You absolutely need to know your subject, but don’t be confined by it. The best experiences I’ve had in the classroom and out of hours in teaching students have been about all manner of far-flung things, not just ICT – my Classics Club has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my career, but you’re never going to see “Is able to teach Ancient Greek” on the specification for an ICT teaching post. If you want to be a great teacher, know as much as you can about as many different things as you can. If you don’t love to learn, how can you expect to get others to?

Communication is a big deal. Not just being able to, but being able to tweak whatever needs changing when talking to different audiences. Differentiation is all about communication – if your favoured method of imparting information isn’t working, what else do you have in your arsenal to fall back on? Discount nothing – glove puppetry, mime or interpretive dance are just as welcome in my classroom as chalk & talk.

For me, the final three are where the real differences lie for me between okay, good and great.

Relationships are the cornerstone. The first thing to realise is you’re teaching kids, and you’re going to get some fooling around from time to time. A solid teacher-student relationship based on mutual respect is a sure-fire way to sort them out easily, but forging that relationship isn’t easy – it takes time, consistency, and interest on your part. You can’t fake it, so don’t try – I had plenty of teachers who taught me very well indeed but could scarcely remember my face once I’d left. It’s not a problem.

Versatility is also a big deal. Delivering an assembly is very different to delivering a lesson, and it never fails to get me hot under the collar… having my colleagues lining the sides of the hall, spectating, has always put me off kilter, but it gets better with practice. I’m also no gifted athlete, but that doesn’t stop the PE cover lessons coming in… roll with the punches or they’ll knock you on your arse.

Resilience is needed to get yourself back up when you inevitably do get knocked down. Whether it’s because of a truly awful lesson where the kids just didn’t get it (we all have them), a bollocking from one of the higher-ups, or just the mounting pressure, you need to bounce back from it. Teaching kicks the shit out of you sometimes, and in my three short years I’ve come to understand why so many burn out. If you truly care about being a great teacher, the last thing you’ll let it effect is your teaching, but letting the pressure take its toll on everything else – social life, friends, family – isn’t a long-term solution.

To conclude…

One final caveat I’d add to all of the advice above is that it works for me. Not all of it will work for you, but some if it will. I’d also add I’m neither the voice of sage experience nor do I consider myself a great teacher, but some of my students do, and compliments like that don’t come along often in teaching, so take them when you can.

To sum up what has been one of the most rambling posts I’ve ever written (I’d apologise, but I enjoyed writing it too much), assessing the quality of a teacher requires the same kinds of differentiation we assess in lesson observations – by outcome, by task & by input. This is unlikely to happen while the people at the very top are so feeble-minded that they can’t look beyond their own experiences as a universal, one-size-fits-all education, but 2015 isn’t all that far away… Surely they can’t do too much damage if we ignore as much as possible in the meantime?

The idea that extraordinary teachers are a myth is bullshit. Yes, we have a lot to manage in the classroom, and nobody can do it all, all of the time. But the truth is that even the best of us have bad lessons, bad days, bad years…

When you have the respect of your students & your colleagues, you’re doing a good job. The best teachers I’ve come across don’t need to keep looking up for any further affirmation than that.

The mouseion was multidisciplinary; physicists had rooms alongside astronomers and poets, and so for the first time in history we see the divisions between academic disciplines being blurred. The major extant work of the poet Aratus is called the Phaenomena, in which he marries science with literature, combining an astronomical description of constellations with the mythology the Greeks ascribed to them. He applied his skills to turn a piece of dry, technical prose into a work of art. It was immensely popular in antiquity – translated into Latin and Arabic, and read by Cicero, Ovid and even St. Paul, who quotes a line in Acts 17:28. ^[1]

Not everyone thought the mouseion was a good thing, however. Timon of Phlius referred to the scholars within as “scribbling endlessly and waging a constant war of words with each other in the Muses’ birdcage.” ^[2] By contrast, academic disciplines in schools are pigeonholed. Isolated. Separated from all others so as to better understand them. There are many good reasons for this – teachers are better equipped to educate students in their specialist field than in any other, so in an ideal world students would enjoy the benefits of an education at the hands of many different teachers who can enthuse & educate in enough breadth & depth to spark a deeper interest in the subject.

There is an exception, though. I’ve argued (not always successfully) that the greatest strength of my subject is that from day to day, lesson to lesson, I can be teaching anything from history to ethics, from geography to physics. The very nature of ICT as an application subject means unless I’m applying it to something, I’m not doing it right. ICT gives us, more than any other subject taught in UK schools, the opportunity to blur the lines between subjects where the learning would ordinarily stop at the classroom door.

Whether it’s in dealing with the effect technology has on the way we live our lives, potentially getting into some pretty heady sociological study, in developing logical thinking by programming, or even in looking at the history of war as I’m going to demo at an SSAT conference, we’re floating on an ocean of material when it comes to content. It’s not all good news, though. More and more ICT teachers are coming to terms with the fact that the people who write programmes of study & exam board specs seem to remain blissfully unaware of this, and instead cling to the old ideas of “make the spreadsheet about a theme park – that’s applying it”. I’ve been discussing the extraordinarily disappointing Edexcel GCSE coursework brief on Twitter recently – the focus is on “upcycling” (a form of recycling). Over the course of the project students are expected to represent this issue through creation of the usual KS3 suspects – a logo, posters, etc – and put it all into an e-portfolio. Thrilling.

By contrast, my year 11s are currently writing essays in which they’re examining civil liberties abuses in China, the increasing difficulty in policing computer laws and computer addiction, among many, many more topics. Unfortunately, they’re completing unit 8 of the OCR Nationals course – almost universally disregarded by VI form colleges in my area, and decried & railed against on the TES forums. How, when the level of thinking involved is so much deeper than even the theory content of the better-respected GCSE, can it be so poorly thought of? It is absolutely true that schools have pounced upon vocational qualifications as a means to climb up the league tables, and I do believe that there is a shred of validity in the proposals put forth in the recent government white paper, the myriad other worries in which Donna Hay discussed extremely well earlier today.

I’m not suggesting that everything that falls under the OCR Nationals umbrella is at the same heady heights as unit 8 (the overwhelming majority isn’t anywhere near – it was never intended to be), but the idea that the only two choices we as ICT teachers have are open-ended, vocational qualifications that carry with them the taint of trying to cheat the system, or patently unengaging, uninspired academic qualifications like the GCSEs, recently repackaged and rebranded as shiny and new for 2010. The major difference between the model exam paper provided for the 2010 Edexcel course and the AQA one I sat back in 2000 seems to be the change of font from Times New Roman to Myriad. As one of many people who believes in the potential power & substance of ICT as a subject, I’m not happy with the idea of these being our only choices.

Nick Jackson & the rest of the #ictcurric band have been making progress in developing exciting, deep, broad projects that students can really sink their teeth in to at Key Stage 3. I was recently asked by one of my year 9s who is now entering his third month of Key Stage 4 why ICT isn’t like it was last year, and my only response was “I’m doing the best I can with what the exam board let me teach.” Poor answer, but it’s all I’d got.

Earlier this evening, a group of teachers was gathered together by Drew Buddie to talk about the problems with girls’ involvement in ICT & computing courses – in itself a fascinating topic, but we ended up straying on to this issue of engagement across the board. Dr Sue Black of UCL agreed that in part due to adversity to change on the part of the curriculum-makers we’re switching too many kids off ICT & computing as subjects. Facing increasing competition from technologically-literate students from countries like China & India, we risk falling behind the times unless we shift the focus of ICT from “doing stuff” to providing students with the thinking skills they need to work through problems independently.

If we’re to avoid the death of the information industry in the UK as we’ve seen with manufacturing & industry, we need to encourage thinking skills & creativity as the cornerstones of ICT education. We do need a change in perceptions from the top, and for current ICT qualifications to be current, but the change also has to come from the classroom up – it’s all too easy to bullshit when there’s a computer in front of you… all too often it can feel like your students are achieving something when they’re really only passing the time with WordArt & Google Image Search.

In order for the subject to be seen as rigorous and important, it has to be taught as such. In order for it to become the modern day mouseion, it also needs to include the scope to encourage learners to bring with them what they learned in Science, French or English – and we as ICT teachers need to be ready for it. No mean feat.

Bibliography

Overduin, F. (2010), Review of Aratus: Phaenomena. Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

Staikos, K. (2004). The History of the Library in Western Civilization, p166. Newcastle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press.

One of my department’s big focuses this year has been Assessing Pupil Progress, the new supplementary levelling structure for Key Stage 3. We didn’t have any idea what it was until our LA advisor, Pauline Hargreaves, gave us an excellent introduction to it in the Autumn term.

Key competencies

For those who haven’t yet got to grips with it, APP divides the curriculum into three distinct fields called Assessment Focuses. AF1 is planning, developing and evaluating, AF2 is handling data, sequencing instructions and modelling, and AF3 is finding, using and communicating information. Doing this allows departments to assess students’ ability across a wider range of skill sets, as well as enabling them to review their curriculum to identify any potential weak spots. Without covering each of these fundamental areas in ICT, how can we give a realistic level by the end of the first term of year 7?

The real draw, here, is that it offers a far more robust system of assessment than the old (or, indeed, the new) level descriptors. I always felt slightly uncomfortable when explaining the use of these to new year sevens: “If you do some of these things you’re a level 4c, if you do most you’re a 4b, if you do all of them you’re a 4a.” The sea of blank faces was always more than a little disheartening, especially when we did all we could think of to ensure they were as accessible as possible - 16 foot posters up in each ICT room with the descriptors in as close to pupil speak as we could get them, etc.

The real point of the division of key competencies hit home when I thought back to teaching a mildly autistic boy in a previous school who was a marvel with anything logical. He could intuitively work his way through some fairly complex spreadsheet work (goal seek, pivot tables) on his own, yet when asked to explain it, or design anything creative, you wouldn’t think the work was from the same year group, never mind the same student. He ended KS3 with a high level 6 based on the quality of his work in Excel, Access & Scratch, which of course fed in to KS4 predictions. He was placed in a top middle set which was completing OCR Nationals with a significant emphasis on graphics, which – of course – led to his grades falling like a rock.

Informing personalised learning

ICT is an intrinsically broad subject, but I think the three assessment focuses identified in the APP model cover everything nicely. Some students will excel in one particular area more than the others, and being able to identify that early means we are better able to nurture those skills, and use this data to inform setting & course choices in the current/next key stage.

At my school we currently only offer the OCR Nationals at KS4, and while they have their faults, they do at least offer a breadth of choice lacking in the majority of GCSE courses. I opted to teach (the wonderful) Unit 8: Innovation & e-Commerce to my top sets (1 & 3) for their second year. The course is largely essay-based, with a good deal of crossover with Business Studies, and radically different to everything the students had learnt in ICT thus far. The majority of students in the top set took to it very well, being perfectly well-equipped with the literacy skills to express their opinions on complex topics like legal, moral & ethical issues in ICT, or the impact ICT has had on society. However, several students in set three who had been working consistently to distinction standard in units 1 & 23 started to struggle significantly with the essay assignments.

This might all sound off-topic, but my point is this; students who excel in KS3 at finding, using & communicating information would be logical choices for an essay/report/presentation-based course. Students who excel at sequencing instructions and modelling would be well suited for a data manipulation/programming course, and students who excel at planning, developing and evaluating should be good at handling larger database/spreadsheet projects. Being armed with such information when students arrive in KS4 would better equip teachers & students to choosing the best possible programme of study.

Curriculum review

Without needing to start an in-depth review, I knew our weakest area was AF2, with only a scant look at spreadsheets that goes as far as IF statements (which is further than we’re required to go by the OCR Nationals coursework, incidentally), an introduction to (flat file) databases, and a lacklustre Flash unit. The curriculum was very AF3 heavy, which was no huge surprise as literacy levels are quite low for new arrivals in KS3 – when I wrote the year 7 SoW I wanted to ensure we were discouraging the copy & paste mentality, so spent a good deal of time hammering that home.

One year on, with a reasonably coherent scheme of work for our two-year Key Stage 3 borne out of hard work on the part of the department, I went to a subject leader network meeting where David Luke, the other Kirklees ICT advisor, put forward the idea of changing Key Stage 3 from the approach taken by many (including us) of half-termly topics on “spreadsheets”, “presentations”, “desktop publishing”, etc, that led to year 7 students learning how to use a piece of software, then leaving it behind them for a year until they came back to it in year 8.

Instead, taking a more holistic, project-based view of topics would ensure that students are revisiting key competencies regularly, building up their skills in gradual steps once per half term rather than great leaps once per year, and coming to see that pieces of software shouldn’t be pigeonholed applications that you use on their own, but that the best possible pieces of work combine many different tools. One year 11 student recently gave a truly outstanding presentation on e-commerce in which he hand-crafted icons to represent the key points of his talk in Illustrator and included a short movie – worlds away from bullet point lists & clip art.

Implementation

Once we knew what it was, and agreed that it would be a useful tool, the next question was, “How do we introduce it?” We had advice from two different sides of the same argument. One argued it’s a tool for teachers; to ensure the curriculum was covering all the bases, as well as introducing it as an assessment method, but the students don’t need to see it. The other advised giving the assessment grids to the students as part of the AfL strategy. “Students should be using these to assess their own learning – if it’s just us then nothing has actually changed.”

Download A3 grid.

As a department, we agreed that presenting students with the A3 assessment grids would be over facing, and counterproductive. Our resolution was to take appropriate descriptors directly from the APP grid and set them as success criteria for project work. We maintain the overview of the curriculum, and students are getting the focus throughout their project, but without having to digest the glut of information on the assessment grids.

Teachers would then have short, individual talks with students at the end of a project after assessing the work to discuss how they think they’ve done, as well as setting targets for the next unit.

So what’s next?

I’m champing at the bit to start the overhaul of our curriculum, and now I have the cornerstone. APP is a solid foundation upon which to form a programme of study that can shape what our students learn, and how they learn it from joining the school to leaving. By involving feeder primaries, sixth form colleges and the students themselves, I hope we’ll have the makings of a truly solid scheme of work with the flexibility to keep it relevant & the robustness to ensure it lasts.

I was interviewed by a freelance journalist for a TES article recently, and was told that our LA ICT advisor was unhappy with the comment I gave on the Rose reforms. “Good ICT is very difficult to teach, and rarely gets beyond skills building, or ‘trivial pursuits’ in primary schools,” I said, annoying primary ICT coordinators everywhere with my sweeping generalisation. “Teaching students to become technology aware – knowing how and when to use it in completing a task, as well as understanding what should be trusted, what should be regarded critically and what should be avoided – are vital skills.”

I do wish I hadn’t been quite so sweeping in saying that ICT teaching in primaries “rarely” gets beyond trivial pursuits, but in my defence I’ve rarely seen it happen in the primary schools I’ve been in.

Saying that we must teach the very young how to use the technologies in existence today would have been like saying ‘adults must teach children how to program a VCR’ in the 1980s. Children are already using computers to the extent that early years teaching would take them to through nothing more than intuition & play.

I don’t want it to seem as if I don’t value ICT as a subject. I wouldn’t have chosen to teach it if I didn’t think it had merit, but elevating it to the level of literacy, and reallocating teaching time from subjects like English & maths seems wrong-minded, to me. Some of my current year sevens arrived with a better understanding of how to use a computer than how to form a sentence. How will embedding ICT in the curriculum earlier stop this from happening? How useful is ICT as a tool if you lack the linguistic skills to express yourself?

I don’t mean to sensationalise, either, but I keep seeing this “ICT is everywhere, therefore it’s an important educational subject” mentality. In presentations the members of my PGCE course gave while we were training, many said exactly this; technology is a part of the fabric of children’s lives, therefore we must teach them how to use it. This is a reactionary view, and one that doesn’t account for the fact that adults are learning to use the same technologies at the same time as children. Can we focus their use? Can we direct them into using a piece of presentation software as a framing device for a verbal presentation on a particular subject? Absolutely. Is this what we’re talking about with the Rose reforms? No.

I’m running a project with some of my key stage three classes at the moment where they have to come up with an idea for an innovation they would expect to see in the next ten years or so, and I’m being consistently impressed by the grasp of how technology works these students have. They haven’t got it from me – the scheme of work has been focused on applications rather than “bigger picture” thus far – but they are coming up with ideas like disposable digital paper (one made the argument that “because of Moore’s law, microchips powerful enough to run one of these will cost pennies in 2019, so we can sell these as disposable computers”), holographic interfaces that will register users’ movements using sensors, personal projectors that will beam whatever display is needed onto whatever surface is available (“But what if you’re standing in a field on a sunny day? You can’t beam it onto the grass can you?” “No, but you can hold out the palm of your hand.”)

These children are so acutely tuned in to current technologies, and how they work, that they’re coming up with ideas the best and brightest are working on as we speak – without looking at the myriad crib sheets Google has to offer. Our brainstorming activity took place in a standard classroom… no computers to be found.

The lessons I had to sit through as a GCSE IT student where the idea of input and output devices was laboured to excess seem a world away. They understand the idea of an interface, even if they can’t explain it well.

So shouldn’t we be focusing on giving students the tools they need to explain their ideas, rather than hammering home concepts they already understand?