David Mackintosh – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by David Mackintosh on 2016-06-28.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that computer coding is taught to children from an early stage in their education.

Nick Gibb

Demand for high-level skills in computing will only grow in the years ahead and will be crucial to supporting a successful economy. It is essential that we have a generation of pupils who have the knowledge and understanding they need to become active creators of digital technology, and not just passive consumers of it. We want them to have a deeper understanding of how digital technologies work and be able to write computer programs.

Since 2014, computing has been part of the National Curriculum at all four key stages. This replaced the outdated Information and Communications Technology (ICT) programme of study. The computing curriculum focuses on teaching children how computers work, the basics of programming, and encourages them to design computer programs to address real world problems. This includes introducing coding to primary pupils. At primary school, pupils are being taught what algorithms are, how to design and write programs to accomplish specific goals using sequencing, selection and repetition and how to apply logical reasoning to detect and correct errors.