Leadership and the ICT curriculum?

The DfE is taking a hands-off approach to ICT as Gove promised that they would do in his BETT speech in January and reiterated by Vanessa Pittard at the Westminster Education Forum on the 12th June. This leaves a major void in terms of who is going to coordinate the development of the A4 ICT Curriculum.

Whilst Naace (the subject association for ICT), CAS (the subject association for Computer Science) and ITTE (The Association of IT in Teacher Education) need to be involved they each have particular vested interests, which so far appear to have outweighed the need for reaching an optimal solution in terms of the Programmes of Study (PoS) for ICT from 2014. I anticipate that we will see a joint statement from CAS, Naace and ICT in the next week or so, which will provide a high level joint position. However, I am not convinced that there is sufficient agreement for this group to come up with an optimal A4 ICT PoS.

There is a real danger that we will end up with a compromise curriculum designed by a committee comprised of vested interests. That would be a disaster.

So who could provide the necessary lead? I can think of only two groups which have sufficiently broad representation to be credible: The Vital National Consultative Board and the Teaching Schools New Technology Advisory Board (NTAB). Both include representatives from Naace, CAS, ITTE, ALT (the Association for Learning Technology), universities, teaching unions, industry, and other interested parties such as Lord Lucas and Lord Knight. Whilst you might expect me to think that the Vital board is the best bet, in this instance I don’t. My money is on the NTAB as being the only credible group to lead on the development of the A4 ICT PoS. Let’s hope they can provide some leadership to fill the void left by the demise of Becta and the ‘hands-off’ stance of the DfE.