According to leading analyst, Gartner, £19bn is expected to be spent globally on educational technology by 2019. But will our children be better prepared to succeed in the future? Will they possess the necessary skills to thrive in an even more digitalised world?
At a glance, the answer is a definite ‘yes’. After all, more and more schools are promoting the importance of teaching children to code as a prerequisite to enabling them to develop logical and problem-solving mindsets.
Are children developing greater problem-solving skills? And are the necessary resources on the ground to maintain and increase the momentum?
In 2017, a report by the Royal Society pointed out that more than half of England’s schools are still not offering computer science as a GCSE subject. The proportion of children who actually sat the exam was a paltry 11 per cent. To make matters worse, only 20 per cent of that figure were girls.
Furthermore, according to an article in the Guardian UK, over 67 per cent of primary and secondary school teachers believe they cannot teach coding because of a lack of ‘skills and teaching tools’. Indeed, we have experienced this particular problem on more than a few occasions. Aside from not possessing the necessary hardware, many schools simply don’t have the personnel with the required skills and understanding to teach pupils how to code.
There is an urgent need for the government to invest more money in the education sector in order to significantly achieve the following;
- train teachers to code so that they can effectively teach their pupils
- attract more individuals to learn and teach coding
- equip schools with the necessary hardware