The government is to scrap the ICT GCSE in an effort to
stop children turning away from the subject.
Ministers have commissioned e-Skills, the computer skills
organisations, to draft a replacement qualification, following
complaints from employers that the current IT syllabus is too
woolly to be taken seriously.
Karen Price, CEO of e-skills, said there had been a 50% fall in
computing degree applicants because children found the ICT GCSE
"boring".
E-Skills has been commissioned to replace it after lobbying on
behalf of employers, who wanted a computing GCSE that was a
"respected qualification with the academic integrity of a science
subject".
Paul Coby, CIO of British Airways and chairman of the e-Skills
CIO advisory board, told the annual conference of the National
Computing Centre yesterday: "GCSE [ICT] teaching is appalling. It's
out of date, it's not about IT, it's not about solving
problems."
He said the industry faced a "crisis" of under-education. "If
current trends continue, we won't be able to keep the IT industry
going," he said.
E-Skills predicts the industry would need 140,000 IT
professionals a year by 2012. Yet the number of students taking
GCSE IT exams had fallen by 14% this year.
David Chan, director of City University's Centre for Information
Leadership and a former head of business systems at the BBC, said:
"If you look at the content of the GCSE ICT examination, it really
has nothing to do with IT. We are actually turning a big generation
of potential people off the industry by offering the wrong thing at
secondary education."
Keith Hollins, ICT business manager with the Building Schools
for the Future programme for Durham Borough Council, said IT
education was "a total failure" in the UK.
"We've got a teaching fraternity who are actually scared to use
the tools that we classify in business as day-to-day tools. It's
not the children themselves, it's the teaching side," he said.
Price said the problem was that the ICT GCSE was focused on IT
literacy, giving people the skills to use office applications and
the internet.
But many children were already IT literate before they started
the GCSE course. A 15-year-old who had taken to developing iPhone
applications in their spare time was typically discovering that the
ICT GCSE was not what they had expected.