Episode 1: Sue Sentance on Computing in Schools across the UK & Ireland
Computing is widely taught in schools in the UK and Ireland, but how does the subject vary across primary and secondary education in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland? In episode 1 of our community podcast, we spoke to Sue Sentance, at the University of Cambridge about her paper Computing in School in the UK & Ireland: A Comparative Study co-authored with Diana Kirby, Keith Quille, Elizabeth Cole, Tom Crick and Nicola Looker. This was published in the Proceedings of the UK Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education ukicer.com. From the abstract:
Many countries have increased their focus on computing in primary and secondary education in recent years and the UK and Ireland are no exception. The four nations of the UK have distinct and separate education systems, with England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland offering different national curricula, qualifications, and teacher education opportunities; this is the same for the Republic of Ireland. This paper describes computing education in these five jurisdictions and reports on the results of a survey conducted with computing teachers. A validated instrument was localised and used for this study, with 512 completed responses received from teachers across all five countries The results demonstrate distinct differences in the experiences of the computing teachers surveyed that align with the policy and provision for computing education in the UK and Ireland. This paper increases our understanding of the differences in computing education provision in schools across the UK and Ireland, and will be relevant to all those working to understand policy around computing education in school.
Full transript and selected references below, cite this blog post using DOI:10.59350/0xs13-ayc66
References
- Listen to this episode at pod.co/the-rest-is-teaching/sue-sentance
- Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts at uki-sigcse.acm.org/podcast
- Sue Sentance, Diana Kirby, Keith Quille, Elizabeth Cole, Tom Crick and Nicola Looker (2022) Computing in School in the UK & Ireland: A Comparative Study UKICER ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research 5 pp 1–7 DOI: 10.1145/3555009.3555015
- This paper was discussed at journal club meeting № 31, see DOI:10.59350/sigcse.1606
Episode Transcript, Machine Generated
⚠️ DISCLAIMER: Please note this podcast transcript has been generated using speech-to-text software and contains transcription errors and speech disfluency ⚠️
Duncan: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Rest is Teaching: a podcast for computing education researchers and practitioners. In this podcast, we’ll meet people who are changing the way that we teach computing from school through to university and beyond. What is computer science anyway? Why should people learn it and how can we improve the way that it’s taught?
My name is Duncan. I’m your host and we’ll be meeting authors of studies and papers that tackle these important issues from our journal club. What is their practice and research? Why is it important, and how can their insights be useful to other people teaching computing in any area of education and at any level?
My guest today is Sue Sentence, who we’ll introduce shortly. We were discussing her paper jointly authored with Diana Kirby, Keith Quille, Elizabeth Cole, Tom Crick and Nicola Looker on computing in school in the UK and Ireland comparative study. This was a paper that was jointly authored and published in the proceedings of the 2022 ukicer.com.
And this particular episode [00:01:00] was recorded in 2023, shortly after the paper was published.
So let’s start with who are you? So you are Sue sentence, who are you and where’d you come
Sue: from? Thanks Duncan. Yes. So I’m Sue sentence. I have. Two roles. Currently I am director of a research center at Cambridge in computing education called the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Center, uh, at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Computer Science. www.cst.cam.ac.uk
And I’m also the Chief Learning Officer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. And this project, these jobs overlap. So this job was, you know, a bit of both. Uh, this, this project was a bit of relates to both and. Basically, I work in computing education research in this at the school level, [00:02:00] and I’ve, I’ve done that for several years.
Um, my previous background was as a teacher and a teacher educator, and these things really mattered to me.
Duncan: Yeah. I know you were, the Americans call this K-12, don’t they? Which is quite a nice Yes. Expression. ’cause it means kindergarten through to year twelve, which is everything up to aged 18, I suppose, in
Sue: computer.
Yes. Yeah. We are increasingly using the American terminology, but in Europe, you know, primary, secondary still
Duncan: works. And the paper we were discussing is this computing in school in the UK and Ireland. A a comparative study, which was published in, it was UK ISA in Dublin in September of last year. With yourself, Diana Kirby, Keith Quille at Dublin, Elizabeth Cole at Glasgow, Tom Crick at Swansea, and Nicola (Looker) also at Glasgow. So do you want to tell us a little bit about, um, what, you know, your paper, a Lightning Lightning Talk [00:03:00] summary of what, what the paper was about for people that haven’t read it?
Sue: Okay. So yes, you can see from the author list that we had, um, representatives, um, in our.
Our group across England, uh, Wales, Scotland, and the Republic of Ireland. And we also had Irene Bell from Northern Ireland sort of advising us on the sort of Northern Irish issues. And the intention of the paper was to sort of capture a sort of a, uh, at this moment experience of, um, school computer science or computing science, as they call it in Scotland.
Uh, teachers experience. And, um, we based the, uh, study on an instrument that’s called Metric, that is a, uh, sort of benchmarking, monitoring, validated questionnaire that was developed by an IC, [00:04:00] um, working group in 2019 and led by Katrina Faulkner and Rebecca Vian and me. It’s been used, it was used then to pilot the survey and make sure that it was validated and reliable.
It’s since been used in, uh, um, some work in Africa that I did and some work that a group, uh, um, led by Monica McGill did in. South Asia. So we thought, um, having collected some data from England and Scotland in 2019, we really should revisit this questionnaire.
Duncan: Yeah.
Sue: Um, and so, and it was an opportunity to look at UK and Ireland as a whole.
Um, and so we, we ran a questionnaire in February and March in 2022 and we had. About 700, 800 responses, but we, we ditched a few of them that were incomplete and that we ended up with 512 [00:05:00] Stellar completed, um, responses across the, um, across the, let’s say five jurisdictions for in UK and one in Ireland.
Duncan: So you’ve got the metric is, um, is, it is not metric with an I, it’s, I, I, uh, it’s metric M-M-E-T-R-E-C-C, which stands for measuring Teacher Enacted Computing curriculum.
Sue: It does. Yes. I’m glad you looked it up. because I was just rushing to go away and look up what it, what it stood for. Well,
Duncan: I was writing it down.
I thought me, I’d written it down as METRIC and then I wrote No, it’s METRECC.
Sue: with the two C’s.
Duncan: So you have this, there’s this difference in, I mean obviously so the, so the big part of the paper, you’re looking at the practice. What’s the reality of what teachers are, are feeling about how they’re teaching.
But there’s also, before that there’s differences in policy. ’cause we have this. System. So could, could you say a little bit about what the differences in policy are [00:06:00] and the way that computing is taught in England versus Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland?
Sue: Yeah. So, um, just to backtrack a little bit, so we, we’ve.
We’ve got this data. We’re anticipating, um, sharing all the data and there’s more data that we haven’t analyzed yet from this survey. But this particular paper, which is only six pages as required by, you know, UK isa, was just looking. What are the differences in, as you say, in sort of. Curriculum policy approach in these 5G restrictions.
And can we see anything in our first analysis of the survey that kind of, you know, that, that, that aligns to those policy differences? So, um, England, as lots of people know, introduced a computing curriculum in 2014, which place ICT, which had a gap in the curriculum. So it was sort of slotted in the same place.
And [00:07:00] ICT GS E have gradually changed to computer SI computing and then computer science, GCE and the A level computing has changed to a level computer science. We’ve had a level computing for since the seventies, a long time. Uh, but um, they got a little bit more computer sciencey. Um, and we’ve had, uh. A reasonable amount of, of, I know, well, a lot of, um, investment in professional development for teachers in England.
Yeah. I’m starting off with the, the, um. Network of excellence where BCS and Cs were funded to run, run that sort of from the early days up to 2018 with a little bit of money. And then we’ve had at least sort of 80 million investments from 2018 to 2022 on the National Center for Computing Education, which was given teachers PD and that, sorry, professional [00:08:00] development and and money to go and do it, and lots of online stuff.
Right. Scott Scotland. Um. I taught computing science forever, as far as I can see. And, um, I mean, just put it in context, when I was teaching ICT and I was trained teachers to teach ICT that point, uh, you couldn’t teach computing science in Scotland without a computer science degree. You know, so, I, so, so, Scott.
Scottish teachers have always needed a computer science degree. In the days where in England you didn’t, so there’s a lot longer history, but there is, um, iterations of, uh, curriculum have taken place with a big change in 2016 and then some more investment in 2022 into computing sciences, and they have, um, it’s called Scottish Nationals and hires in computing science.
[00:09:00] Um, in Wales, um, the cur the approach is very different. Um, there’s a much sort of broader curriculum. There’s been sort of. In some cases sort of overlap with England because we, you know, we sort of, um, there’s a Welsh awarding body that, um, has an equivalent to it in England that has GCCS and A levels in, in ICT and computer science.
But the new curriculum, um, is very much based around. Computing and digital technology sitting amongst a gen, a more general sort of technology subject. Um, and Wales has a program called Techno Camps. It’s been running for many years. Um, supported by EU funding
Duncan: and something else called Techno Teach. I think you mentioned there’s techno camps.
Are the, is that for training the teachers and then techno teachers something?
Sue: Yes. Yeah. Te Techno teach, I dunno if it’s still running. [00:10:00] Quickly, Googles um, I dunno if it still exists. Some she probably listen to podcasts might know. Um, oh yes it does. It’s still Google. Google.
Duncan: So that, is that more of a sort of communities of practice type approach or how would you describe, how, how does it differ from, um, the way way things are done in, in other countries or another?
No, I
Sue: think techno teacher is quite an intensive course, as I understood it was, was, um, uh, accredited at.
Uh, credited at some level at the sort of adult learning Right. Um, qualification and was sort of over a year, whereas the English, um, NCC courses were very much kind of, you know, pick and mix.
Duncan: Yeah. Yeah. Um,
Sue: so then, um, Northern Ireland, um, we teach, you know, we, this IICT has been teach is, is. Very much part of the curriculum.
Um, it’s a much [00:11:00] smaller country, obviously. They’ve had, they’ve, they’ve. Had some difficulties in getting computing in because of, um, because of government, you know, the basics of political, um, situation. And, but they now have GCCA level courses in digital technology, um, and two routes. One is multimedia and one is programming.
Um, and as I understand it, the multimedia is more popular, but the programming one exists.
Duncan: Right. Okay.
Sue: And, um, in Ireland. Uh, completely different education system altogether, obviously. Um, and so there is something called Junior Cycle, which goes up to 15 and there’s a transition year, and then there’s a senior cycle, which is sort of a merge of Jesuses and A levels, and they have computing, science, computer science, and subject at the, at the senior leaving certificate level
Duncan: for the leaving certificate.
Is is that, that’s something. Would be sat by a, what, [00:12:00] 17, 18-year-old student before they leave school.
Sue: Yes. I was talking to Keith about this just the other day, trying to understand it a little bit better. So I’m not an expert. Um, but yes, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a two year course that you can take from 15 to 18, um, and sort of, um.
See, I don’t think you can actually do a straight comparison with our G. Yeah, yeah. It’s a different system. Um. I, one
Duncan: thing, one thing that surprised me, ’cause I’m, I’m a complete novice to this in terms of looking at it from outside, is that it is surprising that there is so much variation just within the UK and Ireland, is, there’s a huge amount of variation it seems, in the way that different policies, the different practices is quite, um, and there’s good in one way, but it’s, it is surprised me that things were so, so different.
Sue: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously England is, is. [00:13:00] The biggest 84% of the UK’s popula, you know, teachers and population, et cetera, is the sort of figure we use, um, for the proportion. But it’s quite irritating. Well, certainly if I was in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, I’d find it irritating, but whenever internationally people talk about.
Computing in England, they say computing in the uk
Duncan: and it’s not.
Sue: Yeah.
Duncan: Yeah.
Sue: And that was another reason for, for a, doing this paper in this very, very split up way. And secondly, for getting this particular paper out first from all of our data to kind of. Not put the record straight, but to sort of raise awareness to people externally.
And I hopefully, you know, K ISA is a a CM conference, so hopefully people will read the paper from outside the UK and realize that it’s not just England, it’s not the fact that UK created a new computing [00:14:00] curriculum. Yeah. Which is what’s written about. And irritatingly all the time.
Duncan: The population’s still big, isn’t it?
You’ve got, I think you’ve got 50, you’ve got 56 million population in England, and you’ve got 5 million in Ireland and another 5.4 million in Scotland. So it’s, it’s still, even though as a proportion of the data, it’s, it’s not, you know, it’s not, it’s not so big. It’s is actually still an awful lot of people and it’s an awful lot of teachers and an awful lot of students as well.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, so. Do you want to, should we move on to the, the practice? Like what, what you, what your findings were in the paper from, so the survey that you ran, um, over, I think, was it, was it 18 months it ran for, was it, no, it was less than that. A
Sue: few weeks
Duncan: affair was few weeks. Okay. Sorry.
Few weeks.
Sue: Yes. So I think, yeah, it was supposed to run through the whole of February. And then as you always doing in these things, you say, oh, we’ve got all this three, you know, we, we a little bit of rattling, you know, rushing around, trying to, uh, make [00:15:00] sure we had enough re respondents from the various countries to get, um, population validity, which we did get.
So we ended up with, um, so we ran it from February, beginning of February to the middle of March, those six weeks.
Duncan: Right. Okay.
Sue: And, um. Just to, um. Go through the sort of questions that we asked and the localization process. So obviously there is a standard questionnaire, it’s suitable for you internationally.
Some of the language we felt wouldn’t make any sense to our teachers. So there’s a little bit of localization that we did in trying to, to, you know, make sure that. A teacher could see questions that talk to them in their language, you know, talked about key stages to English teachers and et cetera, et cetera.
So we asked a lot of sort of demographic questions. Um, we asked about, um, uh. Just make sure I’ve got all the, we asked, you know, all the sort of questions about how experienced you [00:16:00] are, um, and we asked about classroom practice. So how, what sort of things you, you were doing in the classroom. We asked about the, the amount of time you were teaching computing.
We asked about professional development opportunities and um, and take up, and then we asked about computing self-esteem, which is how. How could your self-esteem as a computing teacher?
Duncan: Yeah. And then there’s also, I mean, you’ve broken it down by topic as well, so it’s not just computer science as one thing.
You’re looking at programming and algorithms and cybersecurity and robotics. Yeah. And so you’ve got some information on, you know, how much of each of those things. I mean, I think people tend to sort of think of it, oh, it’s just programming, but obviously, yeah. There’s a lot more to it than that.
Sue: Yeah. So in the paper we, um, we, we reported on the, the topics that were taught, and again, we localized them slightly to take out, to make sure the language was, um, uh, [00:17:00] understandable for teachers in the UK and Ireland.
But one of the interesting findings was that everybody. Seems to be teaching programming and algorithms. Um, that is very, you know, high percentages and a hundred percent in some countries. Um, now to me, if you look at that in. Northern Ireland or, uh, so countries where there isn’t a lot of that, that suggests to me a little bit of a sample bias on the, on the countries that Yeah, smaller populations.
Um, I expect in England that everybody would be teaching programming and algorithms. I would not have expected that into some of the other, um, countries. Um, but generally we saw a, a pretty good spread across all the subjects. And I think that what tells the what. Tells you is that, um, we’ve, computing is a broader subject than just programming [00:18:00] and then just coding.
Yeah. You know, we see in the media, uh, children using code, learning coding in school. Actually they’re learning a lot of other things. They’re learning about web systems, information systems, data representation, privacy, ethics, databases, those sorts of things. Um.
Duncan: And there’s, there’s quite a lot of variation I see in, in, in the table five in the paper.
You’ve got things like AI and ML in some countries, you know? Yeah. England, what, 80? Uh, so, so there’s about 30% of teachers teaching it in, in Wales it’s 80%, no, hang on 40%. There’s 44. 40. Yeah. There’s, there’s quite a lot of variation in, in what’s being taught where, and, uh, uh, uh, and how, how the subject is, is seen in different countries.
Sue: So the AI and ML thing is, is um, is really interesting ’cause it’s not anybody’s curriculum, but everybody’s interested in it and children are interested in it and we, you know, and there are bazillions of new resources [00:19:00] in it. So I think, um, uh, it’s not a bad thing though though that was much lower in Scotland where, um, only 11% of teachers said they were teaching that.
In terms of the other differences, you can see that, um, uh. Ethics was also much lower in Scotland than any of the other countries. Um, whether it’s not called, called that. And we do, you know, we do include the impact of technology and what it means to you as an individual in society. I think it’s a really important part of computing.
So it’s good to see, um, teachers teaching that. Um, the other thing that was low in Scotland was data analysis. Yeah. Um, so. Some interesting, interesting differences and people in Ireland aren’t, uh, less teachers teaching databases. So, so some of these things, um, are like little quirks, do you know what I mean?
And there little slight differences in different countries. [00:20:00] However, um, uh, all in all, I think given the sample size. These differences aren’t probably gonna work out as significant. Do you know what I mean? I think you can see that most teachers who spend a lot of time teaching computing are teaching the breadth of subjects that we would expect and like to see.
Duncan: Yeah. Okay. Good. Um, so is there anything else from the, so, so, um, anything else from the. Any sort of other main findings of the paper in terms we’ve looked at, um, the, the how teachers, um, feel, you know, how, how confident they feel teaching it, what they’re actually teaching. Is there anything else that metric covers that we haven’t already talked about?
So
Sue: we did look at, um, experience and, um, computing self-esteem. So, um, we found that. [00:21:00] So, so Teta in Scotland and England reported relatively positive CS self-esteem Teta in Wales Island and Northern Ireland reported relatively negative CS self-esteem. That’s my, and that’s was a validated construct of 10 questions that been validated through the metric process.
Um, so quite a reliable instrument. Um, and the numbers, you know, n is 3 7 9 in England, so that’s. That’s, you know, that’s a decent enough number to allow, but obviously in Northern Ireland, only 17 teachers building that. So I know, I think you, um, but I mean that does correlate to the sort of, the amount of computer sciences being taught in those across the jurisdictions.
Duncan: Yeah.
Sue: Um, and also we found that, um, more teachers in Scotland were teaching. Teachers that [00:22:00] reported our, that, that filled in our survey from Scotland were actually teaching more that, sorry, let me get this right. Spending more teaching time on computing. Right. Um, a high proportion of their time was spent teaching computing.
And for this, we divided that. We, we, we, we asked teachers what percentage of their time they spent teaching computing with us at a fairly open. Answer, and then we group them into dedicated, which are people who taught computer science and nothing else. Specialists who taught teach computer science, um, for, uh, more than 75% of their time or 50% of their time.
And then non-specialist who, um, taught at the last. 50% and we found that obviously the primary teachers were more likely to be non-specialist. And, um, except there were some specialist teachers in primary in England, which is quite interesting because some primary schools are going to a model where they have one computing teacher who goes in and specializes [00:23:00] across the, the year groups and other primary schools are using, you know, classroom teachers to deliver computing alongside all the other 13.
Subjects. So that sort of came out of our survey.
Duncan: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that kinda makes sense in, I mean, you’re teaching subjects, specialists, subjects like music or for example, you would have, you would tend to have somebody, you can’t expect a primary school teacher to teach everything, uh, depending on the size of the school you’re talking about.
Okay, good. So, um, shall we, shall we let, let’s talk about some of the questions that came out from the discussion then. So, um, there was a question from. Um, and that, that follows on from what you were saying. So a question from James Davenport Bath, who was asking, um, in Scotland, it looks like all the teachers were specialists and with this distinction between primary and secondary.
So it’s the primary, the secondary teachers that are specializing in computing. Is that right or is it also primary in, in Scotland? Y
Sue: yes. It was just a. [00:24:00] Secondary teachers and uh, we should have marked that in the paper. So maybe it was in the presentation, it wasn’t very clear. But yeah. So the, we, um, found in comp in Scotland, uh, it was the secondary teachers in Scotland were more likely to be specialists.
Duncan: Yeah. Okay. And, um, I was wondering what, why we, why do we think they’re Scottish? And one thing that comes out is, one, the Scottish teachers seem to be more confident. Do we know why that might be? They seem to, they, I mean, I know the English teachers were coming out as confident, but I think the Scottish were the most confident at teaching computing.
Do we know why that might be or what, what that might be about?
Sue: Um, yes. I mean, I think, I think they also were. More highly qualified, right? So we saw more teachers in Scotland with um. Degrees in computer science and [00:25:00] master’s degrees in computer science and, and, and that sort of thing we did in the other countries.
I think that’s historical. Yeah. ’cause you’ve needed to have those qualifications in order to teach computing science in Scotland. Whereas in England. You didn’t need that to teach ICT, and now suddenly you find yourself as a, as a computing teacher. And what I thought was interesting in the qualifications is that across our, our respondents, we found such a wide range of qualifications from sort of master’s degrees in computer science, all the way down to almost no qualifications in computing at all.
Duncan: Yeah. Okay.
Sue: But yeah, so the, so the, I’m diverting from the co confidence question. So I think the confidence question is a,
a mixture of the amount of time that’s being spent teaching it. So obviously we saw that in secondary teachers and the qualifications.
Duncan: Great. Okay. Um, there’s [00:26:00] a question from Craig Dean, which was, um, you talk about the intended and the enacted curriculum. So the intended curriculum is what, what the government says you should teach, or what the curriculum says you should teach, and then there’s the actually what happens in the classroom.
Um, so, um, Craig was asking how well do we think each country is doing? I mean, that, that might. Not be a, not, you might not be able to answer that question fully, but how, how, how well do you, and perhaps this is something that comes out later, but do you think some countries are doing better than others in terms of the policy and what’s actually happening on the ground?
Sue: Um, I think that’s, that’s as I said in terms of we get the enacted curriculum from the topics.
Duncan: Yeah.
Sue: Um, and the classroom teaching time. So largely those things in the paper showed what we would expect [00:27:00] from the sort of policies in those countries. I think what Craig was after in that question, ’cause I remember it from the meeting, was a little bit more of a drill down.
Into, you know, are there areas of the curriculum that teachers, you know, particular teachers in particular contexts aren’t covering? And can we use this? Um, is there a sort of advocacy argument for, um, that we, we could draw out from this survey now? Um. I think we’ve got more, as I said at the beginning, we’ve got more analysis to do on that and um, I hope to have more answers to have on that later on.
Duncan: Yeah, I mean it’s, it is an interesting question ’cause I think, um, one thing we talked about was in Scotland they have a, is it’s more of a skills based curriculum, isn’t it? Whereas in, in, in England, there’s more of a. What’s the word? A knowledge based curriculum. So it’s more about knowing abstract stuff than it is about having a particular skill.
So [00:28:00] there’s another, that’s a sort of another dimension to it, isn’t it now? And then perhaps, I think Craig was Craig. I know Craig was interested in that ’cause he was a big fan of the skills based curriculum. Um, okay. Um, so there was one question from. Um, Emma, which was about, um, the, the, the types of schools.
So whether they were state schools or grammar schools or private schools, is that something that you explicitly asked or is it something you can infer from the data?
Sue: Uh, we did ask, um,
uh.
Duncan: The other complication there is you actually got, you’ve got these things called middle schools as well, which,
Sue: do you know what? Yeah, so we met, did this. Great. So, so basically, no, I’ll ask the independent schools question first because that we did ask that. Um, and then I’ll get onto the middle school thing.
So we did ask teachers what kind of school they were [00:29:00] from, um, school type and, um, the interesting thing there. Was that, it was in England. We found, I’m trying to find the actual data. Um, so yes, I have the data. It’s not in the papers, so I can give it to you directly. Um, 73% of English teachers were from state schools and 20% of the English teachers were from private or independent schools.
Right.
Duncan: Which is about, I think is about seven, I think 7% is it of schools in the, in England are private.
Sue: Yeah. So that was, yeah, so that was more than we expected. Whereas in the other countries you didn’t see that. You saw more like 7% country of, of respondents were like from private schools. So we did get a slightly skewed sample on that to answer Emma’s question.
Duncan: Yeah.
Sue: Which I don’t think I did adequately at the time.
Duncan: I mean, the other thing is, is it gets so confusing, isn’t it? Because words like gra, [00:30:00] like grammar school means different things in different parts of the country. So grammar school might be a state school, but it might also be a private school, depending on where you are in the uk have this crazy, crazy, yeah.
With naming where everything means different things.
Sue: Yeah. So we, we did have a lot of debate about this, how we were going to write a question that, that, that made sense across all the countries and also with this sort of this. We had, um, 3% of our in, uh, teachers from England were from special schools. Um, you know, so you know how you sort of phrase that, but that could also be a state school.
You know what I mean? So, you know, do, do we, do you have a, a are you only in one sort of school or are you a school that’s an academy under this, under the other, and, you know, so, um, it could be quite complicated looking at types of school.
Duncan: Yeah.
Sue: Um, but to answer the other. The middle school issue. So, um, [00:31:00] oh, let’s see.
Um. So, so basically we had to ask teachers in all the different jurisdictions what year groups they taught and then, um, in their language of that school. So of course in Ireland it’s a very different, you know, and in, in, in, um, you know, the, the school year groups are called different things and then they.
Uh, in Scotland we have, you know, the primary one to primary seven, and then S one to, you know, different names for year groups. Yeah,
Duncan: yeah.
Sue: And then we put them all together into using the, oh, I can’t remember the name of the system. Um, the system that you use to kind of correlate across age groups. And then we decide, and we found that there were teachers that were crossing primary and secondary.
Duncan: And that was the middle schools in Wales. I think there’s lots of middle schools in Wales where they teach from rather than having reception to year seven as being primary. And then year eight to year 13 [00:32:00] as being secondary. They do something in the middle of year Yes. To year nine or something like that, I guess.
Yes.
Sue: Yeah. So we had, um, so we found that in, in Wales there are more teachers that taught across, it’s called, um. I-S-C-E-D, they’re kind of international standard classification of education. Um, you know, more teachers in Wales taught across the sort of primary and secondary, so we could make the assumptions that the middle schools, um, but there’s other reasons why teachers might be cross phased somehow because they’re independent schools and they teach all the way through.
Yeah,
Duncan: yeah. So,
Sue: um, it’s. Complicated. Yeah. And it’s, it’s nicer to be able to say your primary this and secondary other, but actually it’s quite a complex picture.
Duncan: Yeah. Okay, good. Alright. Um, and I think you me, you mentioned population vi validity, so, um. You, you know, 500 is a, is a good, good sample set. Is it?
What, what does it mean to [00:33:00] be, to have population validity and say that okay, we’ve, we’ve gathered enough data now that we’re confident that, that we can make some conclusions about, um, what the data tells us.
Sue: Yeah. So we did some stats on our, um, population validity. I can’t find ’em in the paper. We spent a long time doing that.
But found that, um, compared to, if you imagine the population of. Um, England is, is 56 million in Ireland. It’s 5 million Northern Ireland, 1.9 Scotland, five and a half, and well about three. And of correspondingly the numbers of teachers. And then we looked at how many respondents we had and more or less.
Um, uh, actually quite close. We had, you know, good population validity across those populations, which meant we had 379 English teachers. Um, so a larger population of English of teachers in England filling in the survey. But, uh, the, the correct ish sort of populations in the other groups. [00:34:00] But that did mean that for Northern Ireland, you know, which is a much smaller country.
Um. Whereas 17 teachers gives us population validity. It also gives us a very small number of teachers.
Duncan: Yeah. Yeah. To
Sue: make, um, any generalizations from. And we, we, um, and we got sort of base or content validity by making sure we had experts on our, you know, in within the, um, within the group to make sure that each of those questions was correctly localized for different environments.
And we also like to say we offered the. Survey in Irish, Scott, scalic, and Welsh as well, so that
Duncan: Oh, right, okay. Golly. Yeah, we had to have it all translated as well.
Sue: Okay. Oh yeah. And quite a lot of money getting the, getting it translated. Um, okay.
Duncan: Um, so then to, to to, to the one final question then I think was, um, what are the next steps for the research?
So you, you’ve done all this [00:35:00] work and I know we sort of hinted at the fact that it’s difficult obviously to publish everything you might like to in a short six page conference paper. So you’ve got more stuff to do in the future. So what’s, what’s coming next with what you’re looking at in the data at the moment?
What the plans for the future?
Sue: We really want to make sure we get the rest of the data out before it’s too old and outta date. So, um, we are planning to put out a sort of a more, um, technical report with all the data because I think, so that people who filled it in, you know, it’s not an academic paper, we can just publish all the results that people can, who filled it in can see what, what the results were.
I think that’s the next step. And then we have two academic papers in the pipeline. One is looking at this, um, the relationship between. Between the amount professional development and the type of professional development you have and your computing self-esteem across countries. That’s the more a generic thing.
And then around classroom practices, so what there are two do, um, what [00:36:00] kind of approaches are teachers using to teach computers computing? You know, are they, um. More didactic, you know, more, you know, what kind of resources are they using? I think that’s also quite generalizable across country. So we’ve got some, you know, we’ve got some nice data with, you know, 500 teachers to be able to report on their own academic papers.
But I think the first step is to make sure we’ve got, you know, the response to the people who filled it in. This is, you filled this in, this is what we found. And that’s first. And then of course we’d like to, we’d like to do the survey again. So either 2024 or 2025. Um, because the intention, so we have some data for 2019.
So the intention is that, you know, you can see as years go on, you should see teachers getting more confident. You should see classroom practice maturing. Um, you might see more experience teachers, you know, if they haven’t all left.
Duncan: Yeah.
Sue: Um, you know, more confident teachers, you know, [00:37:00] this is what you should see.
So you wanna be able to report if that isn’t the case.
Duncan: Okay, good. All right. So it sounds like, well, there’s lots, you’ve got lots of work to do there.
Sue: This is a never ending project, basically, and what we need is somebody to fund it because we just did this, uh, you know, for fun.
Duncan: Yeah. Good. Okay, good. Well, thank you for your time, Sue.
And I’ll say, I’ll put, I’ll publish the, um, a link to the paper in the show notes, but, um, thank you for joining us today.
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