Michael Gove has picked up on something that educationalists have been pointing out for some time - schools are not well served by existing qualifications and curricula in ICT. All pupils are entitled to ICT education but competencies in this area are currently too narrow and too shallow to be useful. Schools are increasingly embedding these competencies into the whole curriculum, making it unnecessary to offer ICT as a separate subject.
It may not be necessary to teach ICT separately but the teaching of ICT skills, and especially of critical digital literacy, is crucial - indeed, it should be an entitlement for pupils. ICT is a universal requirement; computer science would be appropriate to a smaller subgroup of pupils. Let’s not conflate the two.
Kevin Stannard, Director of innovation and learning, Girls’ Day School Trust.