Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the report After the reboot: computing education in UK schools, published by the Royal Society in November 2017, which revealed that 54 per cent of schools do not offer GCSEs in computing studies; and whether they intend to take forward any of the report's recommendations.

The department welcomes the Royal Society’s report, ‘After the Reboot: computing education in UK schools’. Entries into computer science GCSE have risen rapidly since its introduction in 2013, from just over 4,000 to over 69,000 in 2017.

The government is investing £84 million over the next four years to deliver a comprehensive programme to improve the teaching of computing and drive up participation in computer science, including at GCSE. This includes creating a National Centre of Computing Education and a programme to upskill up to 8,000 existing secondary computer science teachers. The department expects these to be set up by autumn 2018, with the first training taking place in the 2018/19 academic year. A pilot programme will also be launched to identify effective methods for improving the number of girls taking computer science.