Why aren't young people taking computer courses at school?

Teaching pay needs to reflect the value of the subject. Anyone who is sufficiently knowledgeable in IT to be a teacher could make far more money in IT rather than in teaching. A philosophy teacher on the other hand may not have overly valuable skills outside teaching. Should an IT teacher therefore be paid more in order to attract talent?
 
MikeTimbers said:
Anyone who is sufficiently knowledgeable in IT to be a teacher could make far more money in IT rather than in teaching?
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Not sure how much time you've spent in the software and IT industry, but it tends to be a cut throat, low job security world. It's not a given in the slightest that you'd be better off.

Firstly "IT" is a broad subject, you could do much worse than a teacher. For example, being a tech support, "hardware engineer", game developer, entry level QA analyst, "data analyst" (the kind which arn't allowed to play outside of their respective reporting engine), even some developers who are tied down to being the customization type roles, data input, the list goes on. There are a ton of low paid or long hours jobs in the space.

MikeTimbers said:
A philosophy teacher on the other hand may not have overly valuable skills outside teaching.
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If you're able to teach philosophy, usually you have a high reading level and critical thinking skills. Usually these kinds of people are sought after at least as much as the politics or economics crowd when going into the finance or law industry. As long as these people can sell themselves in an interview, they'll be fine.
 
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FoxEye said:
Well I don't know how much has changed today, but 1st year CS at uni wasn't any harder than a GCSE. Designed for people with no absolutely IT experience at all.

Entire lectures on AND OR NOT XOR etc. Couldn't really get more basic.
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Surely depends on the university. I know CS or similar degrees are typically a bit poor in the UK but you could probably find a decent enough one at say Oxbridge/London/Warwick and *some* (perhaps only a few) Red Bricks... in the latter case it probs helps if they're rather more engineering-oriented.

Conversely, there is likely some value in the low ranked unis too for a certain type of candidate - the more vocational degrees can be very useful, at a former company we hired one guy from a very low ranked university (as in comically low ranked, bottom of the pile type place) for a techie job but he had solid practical skills, don't think they bothered much with any theory at his place, we were so impressed with him that we hired another grad from the same course the year after and again got a great employee.

I guess the majority perhaps fall in between though - various mid-low ranked unis + probs quite a few red bricks (where CS perhaps has lower a-level requirements than their typical courses)... they'll probs go over some hard/theoretical stuff but not in too much depth as the cohort is mostly mid-wit autistic types and any coursework or exams perhaps need to take into account that most of them spent the previous week or two playing computer games and masturbating.

A good engineering, maths or physics grad is generally a bit smarter and can easily pick up some programming skills (if they haven't already anyway).
 
Cooler running said:
Not sure how much time you've spent in the software and IT industry, but it tends to be a cut throat, low job security world. It's not a given in the slightest that you'd be better off.

Firstly "IT" is a broad subject, you could do much worse than a teacher. For example, being a tech support, "hardware engineer", game developer, entry level QA analyst, "data analyst" (the kind which arn't allowed to play outside of their respective reporting engine), even some developers who are tied down to being the customization type roles, data input, the list goes on. There are a ton of low paid or long hours jobs in the space.
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I agree that working 1st or 2nd line on a helldesk will not pay well but also it's not really IT. Get to 3rd line and it starts to actually be diagnosing and fixing problems, maybe even writing code. All jobs start on crap money but be a half-decent BA or DevOps or DBA and the money should be decent.

I don't agree about the low job security and cut throat nature. Not in my experience (37 years in IT both client- and supply-side including more than ten years with Tier 1 consultancies). Maybe it's true for low skilled staff but good full stack developers for example are massively in demand and paid accordingly.
 
IT was always popular when I was at school. I have two BTEC qualifications that are 'A level A* equivalent' and I used to spend more time messing on than focusing on the lesson itself. For those that are computer competent, the work was straightforward. I ended up helping out mates or trying to teach them to do it - rather than letting them straight up copy - as a distraction from my boredom.

However, trying to look into Computational Chemistry during lockdown last year... (PhD Chemist), that I am out of touch with.
 
Diagro said:
I'm a Computer Science teacher. There is a difference in my view.

If you would like a list of things we cover, let me know.
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I don’t want a list but thank you.

Do you teach programming and networking?

And is this now across all schools, I would happily be proven wrong on this because I feel more people need to know IT.
 
Thinking about this, I'm not surprised at all.

A phone is a PC which requires no skill or knowledge to use and a games console is almost as good as a gaming PC, but is only a fraction of the cost!

Why would kids be interested in IT (PC) when they are redundant for most people other than for work?

~20 years ago I did an advanced vocational certificate of education in ICT, worth 2 a-levels. It's funny to think about how utterly irrelevant this course would be today. Better to do an MS office cert with programming classes taken from YouTube!
 
Vanquish-Storm said:
I don’t want a list but thank you.

Do you teach programming and networking?

And is this now across all schools, I would happily be proven wrong on this because I feel more people need to know IT.
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We teach various forms of programming to key stage 3 students.
Starts with scratch which is block based.
Then moves onto Small Basic to give them a flavour of text based programming.
Then before they do their GCSEs we do a unit using Python.
They learn the key concepts, such as selection, iteration, use of variables, nested elements, functions and others.
They are told how networks work in key stage 3 aswell.

In the GCSE CS, they do networking and get the chance to make a network using networking Labs and real equipment.

The national curriculum tells all schools that they should be delivering this sort of stuff to all Key Stage 3 students. If a school isn't, then they need to be contacted and asked why.
 
Someone mentioned IT/CS in schools do not give them useful skills that they can go and use in the real world jobs,
these are designed to give the children the foundation skills to build on if they wish to pursue a career in IT by moving to A-Levels/Uni Courses.
Pretty much all GCSE/A Levels courses are academic in nature, designed to build them up for further education. Once you get to University that is when you learn the skills that are directly transferrable to work.
Vocational courses are the ones that are supposed to give you the real life work skills..
 
The way my high school in Stoke was "ability streamed" back in the early 90's was that, out of the 7 classes of 30-ish students per year, the top 3 classes were taught mostly theory/academic with no vocational stuff (expected to get A-C GCSE grades overall), classes 4-5 were taught theory to a lesser level than 1-3 plus some vocational things like IT, metal/wood work/CDT etc (expected C-E grades overall) and classes 6-7 did very little theory and was mostly vocational (expected E-U grades overall).

However in practice someone in classes 1-3 might be academically great at maths and have a really strong understanding of electronics or computers but, as electronics/computers were a vocational subject taught in Science for classes 4-7 only, they weren't allowed study it so whilst I understand the idea behind academic streaming of groups it's not always the best choice for individuals.

In the same way, RE (or RS as some called it) was mandatory until you could choose your subjects in the last 2 years, and my RE teacher was a pure "lets only talk about my Christian Faith only" person, zero other religions allowed unless we were talking about general morality when they would mostly be used as a negative example. As a completely non-religious person I got so many detentions for "undermining the teacher" when I said "just because your sky-pixie book says it's true, doesn't mean it is" etc.
 
Diagro said:
We teach various forms of programming to key stage 3 students.
Starts with scratch which is block based.
Then moves onto Small Basic to give them a flavour of text based programming.
Then before they do their GCSEs we do a unit using Python.
They learn the key concepts, such as selection, iteration, use of variables, nested elements, functions and others.
They are told how networks work in key stage 3 aswell.

In the GCSE CS, they do networking and get the chance to make a network using networking Labs and real equipment.

The national curriculum tells all schools that they should be delivering this sort of stuff to all Key Stage 3 students. If a school isn't, then they need to be contacted and asked why.
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When did the curriculum change and what’s the uptake on GCSE IT/CS?

Im guessing schools are not obligated to teach GCSE CS as an option.
 
Vanquish-Storm said:
When did the curriculum change and what’s the uptake on GCSE IT/CS?

Im guessing schools are not obligated to teach GCSE CS as an option.
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2014 it was changed.

Schools should deliver CS to GCSE level, but many can't get specialist teachers, or don't have the students with an ability level suitable to do it.
 
Diagro said:
2014 it was changed.

Schools should deliver CS to GCSE level, but many can't get specialist teachers, or don't have the students with an ability level suitable to do it.
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So I think that’s the point. The kids are not learning it either through their own abilities or the fact that the majority of IT people in the know just go work in the industry.

Teachers don’t get paid enough if you want each and everyone to be an expert in the field. Teach at 20k or work in industry 35k+

GCSE IT is not even an option in some schools.
 
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