Margaret Ferrier – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Margaret Ferrier on 2015-12-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to promote coding as part of the curriculum or otherwise amongst young people.

Nick Gibb

The new computing curriculum, introduced in September 2014 and compulsory for ages 5-16, has been designed to ensure the study of topics such as computational logic, algorithms and coding.

The government has spent more than £4.5 million over the past three years to support schools in delivering high quality computing teaching. This includes £3 million for Computing At School to build a national network of over 350 ‘Master Teachers’ in computer science whom schools can commission to provide training for their teachers.

In primary school, pupils will be looking at designing, writing and debugging programs. With these skills, pupils can create games or useful tools like a number generator for maths.