The teaching of ICT in the UK

Hey, apologies if this is in the wrong section, but I believe it relates directly to the study of ICT and the undertaking of the examinations in this subject. Note, this thread is not for Computing, but specifically for ICT, but you are free to raise concerns of it if there are any present since I'm ignorant of the course.

I'd like to know your opinion on the course structures of ICT (GCSE & A-Level) with your intrinsic exam board. I am with OCR, and I have found it to be one of the most poorly structured courses with one of the most convoluted mark schemes present, with little leeway of discussion available for marks even if you make valid points backed up by the mark scheme.

The course focuses on very deprecated aspects of ICT, and the books I study from have outdated information in them or errors (such as the DPA's section about data distribution in the EEA, my textbook listed it as the EU instead). OHP + Acetate is studied in the sense that they expect people to still rely on it; it's as outdated as the Pascal programming language.

Other than the A-Level offered in ICT, the GCSE I took in ICT was ridiculous. The first two units would be more correct to be taught in Primary School than at a Secondary School, (the units in question here were "Using the Internet" and "Using Windows"). The interfaces are already incredibly intuitive - lessons should focus on giving a more low level understanding, rather than what is seen on the screen.

I feel that the teaching of ICT restricts the ability of a pupil itself, including a story of an individual who could barely scrape a GCSE pass after coding an app in Obj. C instead of adhering to spoon fed PowerPoint presentations by the ridiculous schematics of coursework. Source.

Furthermore, expanding on the teaching of coursework: at least where I've studied the teacher practically spoon feeds everyone everything, verbatim. This in my opinion makes students over reliant on teachers, but I understand that they do so because of the very high grade boundaries due to this effect.

I find Estonia's daring but quick hands on introduction of programming plans, in Primary schools to be an exemplary model for how ICT should be taught.

Looking into University courses, they aim to teach you the essentials of programming to attempt to bring people up to speed in the first semester/s. However, for such a quintessential aspect of modern life, this does not really reflect on the prior knowledge one should have with how technology should work. You can make a parallel to Maths, and the very good foundation of knowledge one receives in it during Secondary School and Sixth Form.

Not to completely dismiss the whole information contained within these courses as null, I feel parts of the course are quite relevant to be taught in depth at these ages like Database normalization, ERDs, relational databases, bandwidth and the such. I feel elements like these would excel in context of a more revamped ICT course, which is to hopefully combine Computing elements too.

Anyways, rant over: opinions cross exam-board? I've only had OCR as mine, so opinions on ICT are very biased to my experience to this one examining board's approach to ICT. On reading this board, I feel many people have been disappointed too, though, expecting As and getting Ds.

The teaching of ICT in the UK

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