Computer Science Crashes

Computer Science Crashes

We are seeing a boom in the jobs within digital technologies … software engineers, cloud architectures, data scientists, cybersecurity analysts, …, and so at school you would think that Computer Science would be booming. Well, not quite. In the Higher exams (N6) in Scotland, Computer Science is switching pupils off in advanced study, and is now in danger of not even being in the Top 20 subjects:

A drop of 21% is the largest fall of any subject, and Spanish is pushing hard to overtake it, and Biology shows good gains, Computer Science is seen to be crashing at Higher level.

In terms of the N4 level for 2019, most subjects show a good rise (a baby boom coming though), with Practical Cookery and Religious, Moral and Philosophical subjects advancing fast. But Computer Science falls again this year, and is now only the 14th most popular subject at N4 level:

And for exam level at N5 we see a 2% drop this year, and where PE, Biology and History all showed good gains:

So what’s the reason? A dull and out-of-date syllabus? A subject that switches kids off at an early phase? Still seen a male-oriented? A lack of standardisation/sharing of content? A lack of teachers? Too difficult? Too much focus on theory? Lack of leadership? Schools able to easily drop subject? Who knows, but one thing is for sure we are switching kids off with the opportunities that our new world is creating … our societies will be built on software, and we need the next generation to fix the problem that we have caused. The Internet is now around 50 years old, but, at school level, we are still struggling to show our kids a vision of the future.

You can analyse the N5 data here: