Herefordshire has a great track record in supporting schools with guidance on delivery of the ICT / Computing programme of study – the Herefordshire ICT Progression materials (2007) were adopted by schools and local authorities across the country. The 2014 Computing Progress replaced that and now in 2020 comes a revision of those materials. So what’s changed?

Computer Science

No changes here to the learning statements, except to divide them into year groups rather than pairs which is always requested by single year group schools – however please don’t take that too literally. What has changed though is the bank of recommended lesson material. These are drawn entirely from three key sources: Barefoot Computing, Code Club and Code-IT (Phil Bagge). Recently it has become possible to use iPads to run Scratch albeit missing certain functionality (especially keyboard presses). The suggested activities lists for each year group indicate what will work on iPads.

The Computers and Networks lists of resources (KS2) have been updated.

Information Technology

The headings have been simplified (reduced) here. Learning statements have been updated and reduced, as have the cross curricular examples. The content has been altered to reflect the far greater proportion of iPads now in schools and relatively few computers.

In response to many requests over the years I’ve finally given way and split the learning statements in each booklet between the two year groups. The most important driver of the use of technology remains the context in which it is used, however, and this will often dictate the skills that are developed. The progression is only a guide and should be secondary to use of technology to support children’s learning in this strand.

Digital Literacy (Online Safety)

This section has been entirely replaced. There remains no shortage of lesson material for online safety and many of the old favourites, which teachers know their way around remain in the table of possible of resources (with a few newer ones). Primarily though, the structure of this strand, and the suggested resources comes from the recent document Education for a Connected World and the even more recent resource bank that supports it, Project Evolve. There are eight strands at every level and often several statements within each – so quite a bit more content here than before.

It should be said that these resources reflect something of a more informed and intelligent approach to online safety, recognising that some of the messages we have given to children in the past have never really had a reasonable chance of having any impact. This should be born in mind when evaluating which older materials should be retained and which replaced.

Assessment

The more complex assessment grids have been removed and only the “simple” one remains. Some learning statements have been reorganised to create six rather than 5 “levels”

Supporting resources

These have been adapted to reflect the changes above. The software maps have been removed and the recommended iPad App list updated – this is always an evolving document anyway.