Teachers effectively embedding Computing with Progression Pathways

Progression Pathways saves Primary and Secondary teachers time and effort in planning Computing curriculums with confidence and ease. Educators have access to thousands of pre-loaded Learning Outcomes, Activities and teaching resources from educational suppliers. Resources are all mapped to the Computing Progression Pathways and the National Curriculum, helping staff to monitor coverage. An ideal solution to "Assessment After Levels", Progression Pathways allows teachers to record and assess both subject content knowledge and computational thinking, using meaningful pre-built markbooks and reports.

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Inventive Computing teachers and gurus have been working in and with schools across the country to ensure that teachers have everything they need to deliver the subject, which was introduced into the National Curriculum in September 2014. Progression Pathways has worked with partner schools to collate a set of free-of-charge, impartial and sans-marketing Computing FAQs available online and in PDF format from: www.computingfaqs.net. In addition, online open forums will ensure that this selection of FAQs are up-to-date and relevant for school leaders and teachers alike.

“Listening to friends and colleagues in the Computing educational community, there seems to be a growing gulf in those schools effectively managing the transition from ICT to Computing and those still yet to get started,” said chief educational officer and co-founder Mark Dorling. “Despite a range of guidance documents and national initiatives, there is a feeling amongst many school leaders and their Computing leaders of not knowing how to get started.

“However, anecdotal feedback from those teachers who are making the transition to Computing in their schools suggests that they are embracing and enjoying the changes to the curriculum, moving forwards the key is going to be to capturing and sharing some of these approaches with the community.”

The Progression Pathways team has also been sharing their expertise by delivering guest lectures at, and running workshops for, a number of Initial Teacher Training (ITT) providers, Local Education Authorities (LEA) and their local partner schools.

Mark added: “There is some wonderful work being done by the Computing educational community to help demystify the changes for teachers. From my own experience, there is some absolutely fantastic voluntary and paid-for work being done by teachers, university and commercial training providers and publishers, all offering a breadth and depth of training, certification and publications to support teachers, but many are struggling with attendee numbers.

“Listening to school leaders, many suggest that Computing is still a low priority in their school development plans, owing to a variety of reasons including the heavy focus on Literacy and Maths, but also to major changes in assessment and the Ofsted Inspection Handbook. Changes to school funding formulas creating budget uncertainty (which naturally have an impact on CPD and lesson cover budgets) combined with school leaders not having grasped how much the curriculum has changed, are also factors.”

The Progression Pathways Computing FAQs contain examples of how other schools have answered the question with quotes to the official guidance (by document name, page and paragraph numbers) from Ofsted, Department for Education and Computing educational community to give school leaders and Computing leads confidence in understanding their starting point and identify what aspects of the school’s Computing provision to tackle first then know what questions to be asking when developing their own solution.

Visit www.progression-pathways.co.uk or contact [email protected] for more information.