Children should be given lessons about computer games in school as part of a radical overhaul of information and communication technology teaching, experts said today.

The curriculum is so bad it is holding back the growth of the UK's creative, digital and IT industries, business and university leaders said.

A report by the Council for Industry and Higher Education today said the ICT curriculum fails to prepare young people for a computing degree or a career in the technology industry.

“The ICT curriculum for schools focuses on using word processing and office productivity tools, rather than engaging children in understanding the computing principles that underpin games, internet services, and green issues they are passionate about.”

Such courses should not be seen as “Mickey Mouse”, the report said. It added: “The ICT curriculum in schools must be radically overhauled to ensure the pipeline to higher education and employment is improved.”

The report's editor, Dr David Docherty, chief executive of the industry council and chairman of the Digital TV Group, said universities must work hard to make sure the UK is not left behind countries such as China, America, Japanand Australia.

He said: “UK universities and businesses need to learn from and replicate the initiatives and innovation environments which brought the world Google, Amazon and Facebook.

“Clearly children are interested in computer games, and we want them to be taught the computing principles and hard maths and science that are behind the games. At the moment ICT is just a box-ticking exercise.

“Lots of schoolchildren use Facebook and play games but do not think of it as ICT. We need to make it relevant to the world in which they live.”

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said: “The Government has been clear that slimming down the national curriculum and making it more challenging and rigorous is a key priority. This includes giving teachers more freedom to adapt their teaching to make subjects more engaging for their students.”

Today's report said technology industries added £102 billion a year to the economy.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23875513-give-pupils-computer-game-lessons-to-help-it-industry.do

I kinda agree. It's amazing how tech oriented our society is, and yet no tech classes are taught to chlidren until college (for the most part).

An explanation for those not familiar with UK education:

At the moment, IT and Computing and similar GCSEs/A-levels (age 16-18) are considered soft subjects and not accepted by many universities, because they only teach Word and Excel and programming MS Office databases in VBScript. Not teaching the fundamentals of IT like A-level Physics teaches the fundamentals of Physics.

What this seems to be proposing, ignoring the irrelevant headline, is adding a 'Computer Science' A-level that would begin to teach real programming and real system design; one that leads on to the university courses in it that actually gain access to high-paying, economically valuable jobs. Such an A-level would have to draw on A-level Maths heavily, unlike current options, because high-level Maths is essential for most real IT jobs.

It's a very good idea, since UK university admissions are heavily based on A-level subject choice and grade, so exposing more people to CompSci before degree-level may help them choose their career. Programming is a great way to just understand computers better in general ("why is it doing this?" kind of thing).

The stuff about games seems tangential to their actual point of UK IT education needing fixed.