The new curriculum is set to be launched in schools next September and the consultation period on the document closed on Monday, having been open for just one week.
The Department for Education has asked the British Computer Society (BCS) and the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) to manage the reform process and coordinate the development of the new IT programme of study (PoS).
Last week the bodies, through a members forum on the Computing at School (CAS) website, gave those working in the education sector one week to share their views on the content that will form the first ICT PoS draft.
This first PoS draft will be submitted to the DfE by 23 October, and the DfE will then hold a formal public consultation on the draft PoS over a three-month period in Spring 2013.
However there is concern that the BCS and RAEng, during their consultation with the IT industry and education advisors, are not giving school teachers and students enough input before creating the draft.
So far discussions have largely taken place behind closed doors or on private members forums, like CAS.
Although the BCS and RAEng argue there will be opportunities for wider consultations later, the concern is that once the draft is completed, there will be limited opportunity for change.
Joanna Poplawska, performance director for the Corporate IT Forum, said she was anxious the first draft of the PoS was being put together without a proper consultation.
"The Corporate IT Forum have 45,000 members who may have not been consulted," said Poplawska. "We are very concerned."
Meanwhile, ICT teacher Ilia Avroutine, who works at the Royal Grammer School in High Wycombe, agreed that more consultation should be taken with teachers before the draft is put together.
"The initial stage in making decisions where there's lots of brainstorming, all ideas are considered and not one idea is shot down is a very important stage. Then should come the gatekeeping stage where the more active minority should decide which ideas can work," he said.
"Currently, unless teachers are active in their associations, like CAS, they would not even know about this consultation, let alone be able to give their opinion."
Avroutine said there needs to be more clarity surrounding the reform process, with teachers clearly told when and how they will be consulted.
"There is no clarity, it is a bit like a focus group that marketing people would put together for a new car - a few vocal ambitious teachers will find a way to give input but that car might still flop if the silent majority doesn't embrace it," he said.
Ian Gover, an e-learning advisor at Somerset County Council and a previous ICT teacher, said the fact that the BCS had chosen to launch its initial consultation in a private members forum on the Computing At School (CAS) website was not promising.
"They [the BCS and RAEng) have opened up the avenues for consultation but the difficulty is that teachers have to find this forum before they can contribute their views," said Gover.
"It's only really people like me who have the time to find these forums who will be contributing."
Gover added that the decision by the BCS and RAEng to hold the initial consultation for just one week before creating a draft document may also put the opportunities for true reform at risk.
"You can't do a draft document in a couple of weeks. This process has been far too quick. Were the BCS the right agency to give this job to? This is the question. There is not enough knowledge coming into the process from schools."
Gover said he remains hopeful the process will improve in the next few months and that there will be a strong opportunity to reform the draft PoS in the public consultation that will take place next year.
"Other education bodies need to be more heavily involved and why are students not being more involved?" he asked.
Roger Broadie, a board member of Naace and a manager at Liberating Learning, suggested the government tends to give priority to the views of IT businesses, at the expense of ICT teachers, and that this will directly impact the reform programme being driven by BCS and RAEng.
Broadie, due to his involvement with Naace, has already been involved in forming the draft PoS in the past couple of weeks.
He said many of the professionals who had been consulted by the BCS and the RAEng were members of IT firms, such as Google and Microsoft, rather than school ICT teachers.
"The government, by choosing to give responsibility to these bodies, rather than a balance of school teachers, is creating a danger that specific people will not have enough sway," said Broadie.
Broadie said the danger is that the BCS and RAE tend to show more bias toward the discipline of computer science, and that this comes at the expense of more technical IT learning, like that of infrastructure support and development.
In response to the criticisms the BCS has said it is keen to give as many people as possible a chance to feedback into the content of the new PoS.
"To do that first we got some immediate input from a small group, which included schoolteachers and representatives from Naace, CAS and ITTE [The Association for IT in Teacher Education] who between them represent key stakeholders from the school education community," BCS director Bill Mitchell told V3.
"Then we circulated the thinking of that group to a larger group for comments, which did indeed need to be sent back in a short space of time to make sure we have time to arrange for further rounds of consultation."
Mitchell said the process so far is going to plan, and has resulted already in lots of input from teachers, IT professionals, employers and universities.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Rosalie Marshall
Quelle/Source: V3.co.uk, 08.10.2012
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