At John Cabot College in Bristol they are trying a new approach to information and communications technology. Conscious that ICT without a context is often sterile, they are merging the teaching of IT skills with citizenship.

Baldev Singh, who has devised the course, said: “We want to teach the IT skills and then we want to use the IT skills to deliver the citizenship.”

It’s a big challenge because ICT, according to a recent Office for Standards in Education report, is the worst taught subject in the curriculum, yet the recent Green Paper groups ICT with maths, science and English as a key subject.

Aspects of citizenship are natural relations to information technology, for instance in matters such as email privacy and censorship. Baldev is confident that all aspects of ICT - spreadsheets, word processing, the internet - can be incorporated quite naturally into citizenship.

“The skills will be taught as the needs arise. We will have a couple of periods per week throughout key stage 3,” he says.

“The course will be structured with natural breaks so that students can learn Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Visual Basic.

“With Excel there will be five introductory online lessons that can be done by pupils either at school or at home linking to the school intranet,” he says.

The aim of the online course is to enable students who do not have the skills to acquire them without delaying those who do.

Baldev believes that social issues such as spending priorities can be approached by looking at last month’s budget. So many pounds will produce so many nurses. But what if they were spent another way, maybe on police?

Presentation will be covered through surveys of online newspapers to find stories that link with citizenship. Students will be asked to summarise a story so they can produce a two-minute news clip with sound and images that can be presented to the class.

This work will mean heavy use of the computer suites. Will it mean that other departments will have reduced access to computers?

Vivien Snow, deputy principal, is clear: “We don’t want to take ICT away from the other subjects. We don’t want ICT to be delivered in isolation. We have at least one computer per room. Some areas have small clusters in their room. In English, for instance, the students can use the suite in the library. All staff are aware of what will be happening with citizenship, how it will be delivered, what skills they can expect from students and when they will have been acquired. We are then hoping that ICT will be taken up in subject areas and developed from there.”

But at Ballyclare High School in Northern Ireland, deputy head Richard Wallace, one of the most thoughtful and innovative ICT practitioners in the province, says: “I am of the opinion that taught IT needs to continue for the foreseeable future. You cannot expect the geography teacher in geography time to get to all the nuances of spreadsheets and conditional formatting. We don’t want to have 10 different people teaching one skill.”

He describes the system at Ballyclare as hybrid. “The skills are delivered in IT classes but we also teach in the context of subjects. The materials that we use in the IT classes are materials that the heads of subjects have given us.

“In home economics, part of their course is to write a letter of complaint about food standards so that the content is dealt with by the HE teacher and the layout is done in an IT class.

“Another example is geography where we deal with the data on individual national economies by putting the figures into spreadsheets to produce graphs. The IT responsibility is ensuring that students can download the data and format the spreadsheet.”

This strategy needs great co-operation between IT and other departments. In addition, some departments have their own small suites: English has six computers, RE has five, and history has four.

Straight skills are delivered at key stage 3 and the work counts towards the ICT accreditation scheme in Northern Ireland.

“We also do work based around ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence, see George Cole’s article on page 22). Most of the staff are studying that and they are able to adapt the tasks they do on their own course to use in a subject context with their own pupils,” says Wallace.

He has been looking to the future and teaching IT to some of the sixth-form through a managed learning environment (MLE).

“We are using Learnwise. In a normal 40-minute period it is difficult to practise differentiated teaching. You will have children with considerable expertise and others who rarely touch a computer at all and it is not easy to deal with such a diverse range. With an MLE they can work at their own pace and out of school.

“One of the key factors is that you must be there. You must invest time emailing pupils, involving them in discussion. I have a whole-class discussion every so often. If you are not there, students soon get turned off and then just disappear. One email a week to them is not enough. You have to prompt them regularly. They must know that you are there with them.”

Transmitting the skills and yet leaving room for subject areas to make use of ICT is not easy. These two schools, in their different ways, are developing interesting models.