According to Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, Mark Logan, Scotland’s education organisations have made little or no progress on digital skills education or computer science teaching reform.
Professor Logan was giving evidence to MSPs at the Education, Children & Young People Committee at the Scottish Parliament. Logan said working with bodies including Education Scotland was like dragging a ‘heavily sedated bull elephant backwards through cold treacle’ struggling with a lack of decision-making and leadership thanks to a ‘committee-led approach’.
This was reflected in the recent workshops supporting the creation of Scotland’s national games strategy, in which
From the 32 recommendations from Logan’s groundbreaking 2020 Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review education was the area which had seen the least progress.
The report calls for parity of esteem and greater provision of computer science in schools to satisfy the huge – and growing- demand for software engineers across the country in sectors from fintech and games, to data and AI.
Computer Science “Not Important”
However, despite initial engagement with authorities like Education Scotland, it quickly became clear they do not view the subject as ‘important’.
In the four years since the report’s recommendations were adopted, the number of computer science teachers across Scotland has continued to fall – with many schools having no provision for teaching digital skills.
Logan criticised a system with no single ownership point for the problem. He listed Education Scotland and other organisations involved in administering the education system in Scotland including the Scottish Government’s Learning Directorate, the exam regulator Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), local authorities, the General Teaching Council for Scotland and head teachers.
He said: “For most of the last four years, I think the problem has been that Education Scotland and related authorities didn’t consider computer science to be important and didn’t believe the subject was in a dynamic crisis.”
He continued: “My interpretation was that against the fact that they didn’t think this was important, and they didn’t think it was in crisis, that that seems like action not worth taking. So I have found that over most of the last four years, when energy was expended, it was usually expended in defending the situation and hoping I’d go away, rather than trying to lead on these issues, because we leadership’s what’s needed here.”
By The Numbers
At the beginning of his evidence, Professor Logan outlined some of the raw data to illustrate the scale of the challenge it has been in recent years to sustain computer science as a subject.
According to Professor Logan, the tech sector is a “function of the number of engineers that you can supply to it”, which makes the education system crucial to sustaining its future.
Countries such as Estonia, Finland, and Lithuania had “really absorbed that point” and had invested significantly in their skills and talent pipelines. But in Scotland he pointed to weak – and weakening provision – for computer science teaching.
“If you look at where we are from a numbers perspective, we have today in Scotland at least 32,500 pupils, which is about 12% of the total base with no access to a computer science teacher in their schools,” he said, caveating that the data had been gathered at local authority level which left some of it in forms which did not support analysis.
Those figures covered 66 schools, including 27 schools with more than 500 pupils and 10 with more than 1,000.
“It’s not a great picture,” said Logan, “It’s worse than that, though, because there’s a bunch of schools that only have one computer science teacher. So, let’s not fool ourselves: that’s not really a computer science provision in those schools.”
Postcode Lottery
The problem is increased in some specific areas of the country. “We have computer science deserts in Scotland,” said Logan. “In the north of Scotland, over half of our schools have no qualified computer science teacher, and in the south of Scotland, two-thirds of our schools have no qualified computer science teacher. That adds up to a bad static picture, and to me it sounds like a crisis.”
This is compounded by a long-term decline in teacher numbers, with computer science teachers falling by 25% since 2008. In that year, there were 766 teachers compared with 578 now – a record low. Only 16 were recruited into the profession last year, compared to an average of 44 at its peak.
Logan also noted that eight times as many computer science teachers are in the over-55 age bracket versus under-25, leading to a “demographic time bomb.”
All of the above issues make computer science teaching in Scotland “very vulnerable”, said Logan. “That’s why in STER, I raised this as a priority area, but we haven’t made the progress that’s required.”
STACS – A Bright Spot
Logan was able to highlight a few ‘bright spots’ including the creation of the peer-led Scottish Teachers Advancing Computer Science (STACS). The group – led by computer science teachers Toni Scullion and Brendan McCart – had been set up as part of an unpublished recommendation following STER. It is designed to bring computer science teachers together from across the country in a network, to disseminate best practices, support the uptake of new skills and address the dynamic and rapidly evolving discipline, given the impact of new technologies such as low-code, no-code, AI etc.
Logan noted the achievements of the organisation which has signed up 490 of the 578 computer science teachers across the country. One of the core aspects of STACS is supporting the ‘teachability’ of computer science and improving and increasing teacher knowledge to find new ways to convey more challenging topics across computer science examinations and assessments. STACS has worked successfully with the SQA to help upskill teachers across the country.
Logan said: “It’s a fantastic model that should be being replicated in all the sciences, in my view, which is to take our most experienced teachers, who have created material to teach our less experienced teachers in the areas that they are currently feeling challenged.”
“The great thing about it is that it’s a national scale programme right away because it uses the teaching network,” he added. “In my view networks usually trump hierarchies.”
Direct Engagement
Logan recommended that STACS assume a central role in the education process – engaging teachers directly with their challenges, rather than having ‘solutions’ “visited upon them”.
The serious issues around recruitment were also addressed. According to Professor Logan, it’s not the fact that salaries are low, or that everyone wants to be a software engineer. One potential solution would be to get computer science teachers to go and talk to young undergraduates about the profession in universities, as a cost-effective way to promote the subject. As computer science degrees often incorporates options such as AI in the third and fourth year – Logan also suggested combining elements of the PGDE teaching degree.
“My ask is that the authorities who are charged with educating our children lead on this like they really mean it. And that hasn’t really been evident,” Logan told MSPs.
According to Logan, STACS has produced a list of around 50 issues that could be easily solved – without requiring money, which would raise both standards and morale among the teachers.
Solutions Not Committees
For example: thanks to data protection regulations, computer science teachers currently need to go to local authority officers for approval to use certain online teaching materials, which is hardly an effective use of their time. It should be done for them, said Logan, adding: “Somebody should be convening and knocking heads together and getting that sorted. Interestingly, our independent schools don’t have that problem; they can use all these tools because they have a sensible approach to GDPR.”
“I would like responsible leaders to sit down with the STACS team and say, ‘What is it you need? We will get that done for you,’”
“We don’t need committees to be formed…” said Logan. “…we convened a committee of people from different education bodies, and we tried to make progress here. I spent a year and a half in that process. It felt very inertial; there was a lack of leadership in the room.”
He said: “It was like walking through cold treacle backwards, dragging a heavily sedated bull elephant.”
He said they reached the point of agreement to recruit more computer science teachers – and it has been costed. But eventually, the plans were not funded, with Logan concluding that it had been a “waste of time”.
It Matters
Moving forward, Logan said he wanted people at the most senior levels of government to sponsor this plan and that he would like to see STACS providing the leadership and authority to enact many of the changes it had identified.
“We need to lead on this issue like it matters to the economy,”