Improving teacher knowledge and expanding the scope of the curriculum

 For the purposes of improving teacher knowledge and expanding the scope of the curriculum, a nonprofit organization called Computing at School established a coalition of industry representatives, teachers, and parents in 2008. The organization would go on to play a pivotal role in rebranding the information and communications technology (ICT) program of study in 2014 to the computing program that placed a greater emphasis on CS (Royal Society, 2017).[1] By changing the program, the government instructed schools to provide more rigorous instruction in CS concepts like Boolean logic and programming languages.

Executing the new computing program was a great challenge. Many teachers immediately felt uncomfortable with the new material (Brown et al., 2014; Sentance et al., 2013), regarding it as an exceptionally difficult subject to teach and learn (Royal Society, 2017). Before the new computing program, teachers were offered training only in ICT. From 2014-2018, the Department for Education (DfE) allocated modest funding for this purpose, and then fell short of its targets for training CS teachers, leaving schools with jobs with a computer science degree number of qualified teachers (Staufenberg, 2018).

To improve teacher preparedness, Parliament and the DfE made significant investments in training CS teachers. In November 2018, they allocated 84 million pounds to establish the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) to train teachers (Cellan-Jones, 2019). Drawing on help from nonprofit organization partners, the Centre creates lesson plans and resources, runs training programs, and offers certification for preservice and in-service teachers. Since the Centre’s opening, it has engaged 29,500 teachers in training, 7,600 of which have benefited from continuous professional development.