Switching on to a
 new style of education

Prior to Michael Gove’s announcement at Bett 2012, the ICT curriculum was supposedly too limited for the ever evolving world of technology that we live in today, or in Michael Gove’s words, it was “failing to prepare youngsters for the future.”
    
If we are to compete globally, students have to understand the breadth of today’s technology and be prepared for the technology of tomorrow. In parallel with developing technology, children’s aptitude and understanding is also constantly evolving – just think how quickly touch screens and social networking have become the ‘norm’. This has to be reflected in the level of our teaching.
    
However, from September 2012 schools were left to decide what they were going to teach, and this time the scope of the curriculum was thought to be too broad. Teachers across the country were just not prepared or suitably trained for the huge task of creating a new curriculum. Added to this was a lack of ring-fenced funding to support it.
    
In general, primary school teachers were not ICT experts and weren’t qualified to modernise computing education. So in many schools, the situation carried on as before – until the new curriculum changed things.

A new challenge
Chris Speller of Elm Park Primary School explains: “At Elm Park Primary School we had a staff meeting a few months ago to introduce the new curriculum. We realised that despite having the knowledge and experience, the new computing curriculum introduces a whole new vocabulary. We started by asking questions such as ‘does anyone know what an algorithm is?’; ‘Who can code and develop sequences’?; ‘Who knows how to create an app?’ and so on. We had a lot of worried staff in the room, until they realised that what was required was only, to a certain extent, what they were already doing.
    
“Our teachers had the understanding, passion and vision to achieve a 21st Century technology experience for our children but had never actually received formal training.

However for us in Havering, things weren’t as daunting as they were in many other areas.”

Benefitting from guidance
Chris mentions the support received by staff at Elm Park: “In the early days, we were lucky enough to have the guidance of Dave Smith and Amanda Jackson, ICT advisers at Havering’s School Improvement Services’ ICT Team. Working with sector computing experts including Miles Berry of Roehampton University and Naace, the inspirational Terry Freedman, who had formerly worked for QCA and Tom Barrett, now senior consultant at NoTosh, and publisher Rising Stars, Switched On Computing had been created. Designed as a series of schemes of work with associated creative activities and links to free software resources to support learning, we started to get quite excited by the freedom that the new curriculum offered. We started to see a way to achieve amazing results from teaching computing to a new, exciting and appropriate level.

“Working through the step by step approach provided by the curriculum, our staff started to realise that when you have the correct level of support and understand the terminology, the task becomes much smaller. The most complex and off putting part of the new curriculum is the words; the way the materials have been designed is ideal and the teachers picked it up straight away.”

Getting started
A major decision at both schools was how to implement the new curriculum. Chris explains: “At Elm Park we decided that as the teaching would be new to all teachers and students, we’d introduce each activity on a whole school basis. So for example, the animation unit was taught across the whole school because although it’s a Year 3 activity, the Year 5 students hadn’t had the chance to learn this under the previous curriculum. Each class teacher adjusted the activity slightly to suit the year group but on the whole it was applied across all groups.”
    
Stella McCarthy of Benhurst Primary School explains how they got started. “At our school we invested in training for the ICT coordinator, who was then able to cascade the information to whole staff. We are lucky to have had support from Dave Smith and Amanda Jackson from the Havering School Improvement Services ICT Team. Each teacher was given a trial unit to read through with the invitation to go to the ICT coordinator if they had any concerns. After that, each year group decided how their units would fit into the schemes of work for their year.“

Tailored to course materials
Stella discusses how she and her colleagues made the course work for their pupils: “Because we do a lot of topic based work, certain units fitted in better with different activities. For example, when we were doing a topic on transport, the children worked with Scratch to create their own vehicle and took it on a journey. At Key Stage 1, the students were programming the Beebot cars to follow a given route. Equally, when we were studying Henry VIII and Tudors, they created a character of the King at various stages in his life with animated speech bubbles that related to the major historical stories of that time.
    
“For those schools who haven’t used Scratch, it is a free online resource that lets children programme their own interactive stories, games, and animations and share these creations with others online.     
    
“We then asked the Year 5 students to help the Year 3 students, a scheme that worked very well. During staff meetings we would share experiences and learn from each other. If someone had a specific problem, the chances were that someone else had worked out a solution. For the next two terms we’re going to continue in this way until eventually each year will embark on its own scheme of work from September. It is wonderful seeing the children so engaged. They are coming in each morning telling us what they have created at home; it really is supporting their learning and home/ school links.
    
“However, rather than just set them off using the programming resource, the curriculum gives us creative ideas for appropriate activities to ensure the students learn to think creatively, work collaboratively and reason systematically, which are all essential skills for life in the 21st century.”

School collaboration
At Elm Park the students are now sharing their animations with schools across the world, seeking feedback and comments from other schools. As part of an eTwinnings initiative the school is working on a project with schools in Spain and Turkey.
    
Both schools are finding that the curriculum provides primary school teachers, with a structured range of dynamic activities and a comprehensive list of topics with open source or existing software. The teacher pack which includes short tutorial videos is a great help.

Chris continues: “We have already started carefully building the skills of pupils from Year 1 to Year 6, including programming and computational thinking. For schools not using resources such as Switched on Computing, we recommend breaking the schemes of work down step by step and building up a bank of creative ideas to deliver the learning in an appropriate and exciting way, ensuring it has purpose.”

The results
Stella concludes: “The best part of this new curriculum is that it is not just the more able children who are excelling. We are finding that many children are completely absorbed in the learning, and achieving incredible results. Even those children with Special Educational Needs are thriving; they work well with the systematic approach to learning.
    
“Boys who don’t enjoy writing are finding that computing offers them another way to present their thoughts. This used to be via resources such as PowerPoint but now they are able to explore the best way of conveying their thoughts.”

One student at Benhurst Primary School wrote his review of the new computing lessons: “I really like computing and I want to do it at home. I like the computing lesson where we make a film and then show it to mum. Scratch is brilliant – it is the best computing lesson. I like creating different games and videos. I love making different characters and different back drops and changing the gradient of colours.