Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent steps she has taken to encourage schools to provide students with hands-on programming experience.

The new computing programmes of study, which were introduced in September 2014, have a greater focus on how computers work and the basics of programming. They also cover digital literacy and the application of information technology. Primary school pupils should be taught how to design and write programs to accomplish specific goals, using sequencing, selection and repetition; and secondary school pupils should be taught to use at least two programming languages to solve a variety of computational problems.