Vision for I.T at The Wilnecote School

Our aims and ambitions are to allow students to develop deep knowledge of how to use computers safely and effectively, as well as understand the theory and development processes behind a range of products from both the virtual and physical world. Our curriculum allows students to move forwards beyond school with essential skills for a range of potential careers and applications in later life. The National Curriculum for Computing contains 9 separate statements, and we design our units of work across KS3 to cover these multiple times throughout years 7, 8 and 9 due to the importance of some of these statements. There is a heavy lean on e-safety and understanding how to use computers and the Internet safely and effectively, and as such we cover this at the start of all three years in addition to delivering whole-school assemblies on the safe use of social media and other online services.

The curriculum was designed to not only meet the needs of the NC statements, but also to provide students with a broad range of topics across four different subject areas – Computer Science, ICT, Media Studies and Business. When the school moved back to a three-year Key Stage 3 it allowed us to keep the units we’d used previously (which already met the NC statements) and add additional, newly created units in Year 9 to introduce skills and understanding that, while not required under the NC, we felt would be interesting and exciting for students to learn about and experiment with. Units are sequenced in such a way that the learning from one leads into later units and reinforces what has been taught before, both within the same year but also in subsequent years as well, such as the development of programming knowledge and skills starting in Year 7 and building through to Year 9 ready for the Computer Science GCSE if chosen. Similarly the use of IT software such as Office applications builds up over KS3, introducing more complex and useful features and skills as well as adapting skills to new scenarios and contexts.

Development of the curriculum has happened over several years, with units being constantly evaluated, changed, added or removed to best suit the needs and requirements of the students. As the KS4 qualifications have changed these too have led us to adapt the units we deliver to ensure students are best prepared for their potential option choices in Year 10 and 11. Sequencing has been carefully considered following a range of CPD and staff training sessions, allowing us to break down units into their component parts to ensure that not only the NC requirements are met, but also that the units suit our own students and take advantage of the expertise we have available within the department.

Within IT and Computing there are several sets of knowledge and skills that are essential, some of which are covered by the National Curriculum but also others that I feel are required. The NC heavily features e-safety and programming (5 of the 9 statements relate to these two topics alone), both of which are featured repeatedly across all years between 7 and 11. Even if students don’t move on to continue programming after Year 9, the ability to take a problem and decompose it into smaller manageable elements is a skill that can be translated into a wide range of real world scenarios, and so covering programming in every year of KS3 is a vital skill for students to learn. Programming begins in Year 7 with block-based programming which introduces a range of important programming concepts that will be used throughout all levels of programming, and is revisited and used during later programming units across Year 8 and 9. E-safety has its obvious importance in the curriculum, but we have adapted and developed our schemes to ensure that every year group has a personalised e-safety unit to cover issues and concerns that are age-appropriate and carefully targeted.

Additionally a new focus in year 7 on computer systems, hardware and binary allows students to develop an early understanding of how computer systems work, how data is stored and processed and how this underpins everything they do using a range of digital devices. We also still use Office software to teach what we consider to be vital IT skills, and while this isn’t part of the National Curriculum we are conscious of students requiring these skills not only in later life, but also to effectively complete work required by other subjects within school.

Throughout our curriculum we are consistent in the way practical projects are carried out, teaching general good habits in terms of the development of products but also teaching important design and development skills for Key Stage 4 ICT options. Practical tasks go through a series of stages of planning, design, creation and testing, which is something carried out consistently throughout all practical units and develops an understanding of the importance of the full development cycle of a digital product. Again this has cross-curricular benefits, bringing students away from the “that’ll do” nature of creating a quick piece of work without first thinking about the way users will respond to it. This idea of decomposing a problem into smaller parts works across multiple strands of the curriculum, be that programming, spreadsheets, magazine design and almost all other units, and is a definite skill that can be practised and improved by students over their time in school.

Following the series of lockdowns there were obvious gaps and inconsistencies in the learning and knowledge of the students. The nature of our units allowed us to recap key concepts that may have been missed, for example looking back at the Year 7 computer hardware unit benefits the understanding of the binary work completed later in the year, and as such the work some students may have missed or failed to access can be retaught while still being relevant to the later unit. A similar example in Year 9 would be how film posters are used within the marketing phase of a film’s release, allowing us to go back and have another look at the marketing lessons from the previous Business-based unit. As a result of the careful sequencing of the units of work and the way the units build on each other, gaps from the periods of online learning or other absences are filled naturally as later units progress. We are able to check understanding through end of unit assessments, and use these to guide ACTs which will allow students to research and fill gaps that have arisen from the assessments.

Throughout the year we look as a department at how the units have been to teach and whether any changes need to be made, or if there are other units we can deliver to provide a better curriculum for the students. In addition to this individual members of the department will often develop new resources for existing units and share these with the rest of the team, which can then be integrated into the schemes themselves when they are next taught. As such the Computing curriculum is constantly evolving and improving, and while we will experiment with new units to see how effective they are these units are a valuable step in producing a varied and relevant sequence of units.

This approach has been guided by the Principles of Instruction by Rosenshine, which provides a series of ten ways to ensure learning if maximised. Those that we focus on in lessons include starting a lesson with a recap or review of prior learning, both to embed knowledge but also give a stronger idea of how the various lessons link together. We also often provide models or templates for students (especially with more practical tasks) to enable them to solve problems faster and focus on the skills that are important, and scaffolding for lower ability students to remove barriers in accessing the key learning.