By Natasha Lomas, 1 July 2008 15:49
NEWS
The number of students applying to start postgraduate teacher training courses in IT this academic year continues to slide.
The latest stats from the Graduate Teacher Training Registry (GTTR) show total applicant numbers across all subjects for England, Scotland and Wales are 18 per cent down on 2007 - with IT showing the second worst decline of secondary school subjects.
As of June 2008, a total of 508 men and 273 women had applied to do an IT PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) in the UK, compared to 619 men and 333 women by June 2007. Only physics has a bigger decline in applications, with a drop off of 27.5 per cent.
Back in February, the percentage of students applying to study an IT PGCE in England was 16.3 per cent lower than the year before. And while the situation in this region has improved slightly - applications are now down 15.8 per cent - IT applications in England are still seeing the second biggest decline after physics.
Business studies, biology and chemistry - which, earlier in the year, all had bigger declines in applicant numbers than IT - are now declining at a slower rate than IT.
At the start of the year, industry sector skills body, e-skills UK, predicted 140,000 new IT and telecoms workers will be needed annually to satisfy the industry's demand for increasingly skilled staff.
Margaret Sambell, head of strategy for e-skills UK, said: "IT is fundamentally important to business and society, and IT is recognised as a subject of strategic importance to the nation. With employment in the UK's IT industry continuing to grow five times faster than the all-industry average, it is essential we inspire young people about technology and encourage them to consider becoming the IT professionals of the future. We should all be very concerned about this decline in students applying to teach IT."
Speaking last month, a leading academic called for the IT curriculum in schools to be overhauled as he claims "boring" ICT classes which focus on Word and Excel are turning teenagers off IT as a career. As it turns out, they may also be turning off potential teachers.
According to the GTTR, student numbers to all teacher training courses continues to decline - with the total number of applications 8.3 per cent lower than this time last year.
Music, Spanish, drama, home economics and social studies are the only subjects showing increased numbers of applicants.
Comments
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1. sam
Margaret Sambell, head of strategy for e-skills UK, said: "IT is fundamentally important to business and society, and IT is recognised as a subject of strategic importance to the nation."
If this was true, the government would actually be doing something about downsourcing/offshoring, and poor wages. Corporations say they are paying competitive wages, perhaps competitive with indian wages.
Teachers are smarter than you give them credit for, and understand what is happening to current IT workers and their very short careers. Why would a teacher want to try to teach in a field where there will be a declining number of students?
The problem is not the curriculum. With the current trend of constant cost
cutting, downsourcing and offshoring of anything IT related, as a potential
student looking at careers, why would anyone want to go into IT? Other careers
are more stable, with a higher likelyhood of making it to retirement. There are
too many actual examples of I.T. workers having their jobs churned. Upon finding
another job, they find that the pay offered is below a "living wage". For the older
worker, they eventually find out that they are "too old", if they get any response at all.
2. anonymous
Oh dear me! One cannot escape the conclusion that UK children are reluctant to study anything even remotely difficult or that might demand precision - answers that are plainly right or wrong - rather than waffle.
(BTW - Good for those opting for Spanish - they will find out it is harder than they imagine - but stick with it. Worth speaking the 4-5th most used language in the world.
Sadly it is those now avoiding studying "difficult" things who will be lamenting living in a country with a declining economy and standard of living in 15-20 years time, maybe sooner. Annoyingly I will probably have to put up with those circumstances too, as will many older and better skilled people.
3. Roger Huffadine
Hardly surprising - the IT curriculum is crap and you end up teaching all of the kids who think that GCSE IT is a free ticket to play computer games all day.
I know some exceptional IT teachers who have left school to get a real life.
4. Simon
Lets see now :
- the pay isn't "startlingly good"
- you can see that what you are teaching is "not relevant" and even counter productive
- you get all the blame for political curriculum cock-ups
- and the way the law is set now, just one kid has to make a totally unfounded complaint and you are barred for life from the job
Hmm, I wonder why applications are down ?
5. David Fletcher
That's exactly the impression I get from what my son does in ICT lessons - boring.
Instead of teaching important stuff, like how computers work, what's inside the box, how to put one together, what an operating system is and how it does its job, IP addressing, etc., they seem to be teaching them secretarial skills on what will soon, I hope, become obsolete software.
Unlike the many unfortunate ones who have unskilled parents, my 13 years old son knows exactly how to swap a hard drive, install a Linux desktop operating system, get it updated and install the extra applications he needs. That's the stuff that the schools should be teaching, IMHO.
6. Paul Tansom
I wasn't aware they actually taught IT in schools anymore... OK, so I'm only half serious there, but from what little I have seen of school IT I was under the impression that it was bundled up with Business Studies now, only teaching you how to use MS Office, with perhaps a little MS Publisher for DTP and MS Frontpage for web design if your (un)lucky.
I would quite enjoy teaching IT, but what I would want to teach would be the skills that a business like my own requires, and I don't think that bears any resemblance to anything on the current National Curriculum unfortunately. In fact I'm expecting to have to teach my two sons about computers as they grow up as they are clearly interested, but I don't see it being adequately covered at school.
Personally I'm glad I grew up with the home micro computers of the 1980s, because I see nothing in the current world of the Windows PC to catch a young persons interest.
If schools used and taught computers using open source software then perhaps students would see the possibilities in a career in IT. I've seen in happen in fact, at my local Linux User Group (LUG). Students developing an interest in how their computer worked, being able to explore, modify and get involved and then go on to work in IT. Of course this is all outside school and done in spite of what they are taught there!
7. David Fletcher
I have to agree with Paul. Once upon a time it was pretty simple to get a computer to "do something" by hooking up some lights and switches or even an ADC to get it to measure temperature for example. This stuff was once easy to accomplish at home, for somebody with sufficient interest and a willingness to learn. For a while, I seem to remember, the standard excuse for buying a BBC micro, Dragon, TRS-80 and a multitude of others was to learn to get it to control something - usually the central heating.
In more recent times, it could still be done with the IBM PC. With the ISA bus it was possible to either buy or make interface cards with some IO ports on them and get things connected.
But now, alas, everything has become way too complicated to even contemplate this sort of experimentation. Linux, the users groups and the openness are a fine thing. I can do a Google search and find out exactly how to write a Linux device driver to operate some IO ports on the machine. Unfortunately, we no longer have nice, simple interfaces such as the ISA bus. The current technology is PCI Express. Personally, I've got absolutely no idea how to build a board of my own to plug into that. I've not been able to locate any ready made products for experimenters, either.
I fear that the learning curve required to get any electronics to do something original and interesting is getting too steep for students to stand a realistic chance of doing much other than learning, at best, how to do some interesting work with existing software. Such things could include configuring home mail servers, for instance.
The good old days of being able to fool around with machinery to learn about how it works are just about gone. I say just about because it is still possible to buy Single Board Computers based on the PC-104 standard which is electrically the same as ISA, but based on a stackable connector instead of a backplane. They tend to be used in industrial and military applications, though, so they are relatively expensive.
Sorry to be gloomy, but I do not see any methods, these days, to spark a real interest in the young people in modern electronics and computers. It's all become too complex to get deeply involved in the time available to the school student. Perhaps it would be a good time to develop a modern replacement for the BBC micro, or at the very least some products to plug into a modern PC motherboard and allow a little experimentation.
8. Fred Wagner
The point that the schools seem to miss is that most of us who have been making a living in IT for decades did so without any mention of it in schools! Learning to read and understand, reason, solve problems and puzzles, make a plan and follow it, were the skills that helped us adapt to IT as it came along and make it part of our lives. Get back to teaching reading and writing and reasoning and mathematics (real math, not 'new' match), and let the computer stuff be a hobby club, like ham radio was back in the 50's and 60's (and still is in many places). Hams now use computers to talk through their radios, track satellites, and more. They build electronic circuits, etc. Teach the fundamentals of physics, electricity, magnetism, optics. Don't bother teaching classes in Word and Excel except for slow learners who need it.