CH A P T ER 5
What has changed is the qualifications that students are being entered for. There has recently been an upsurge in new ‘vocational’ ICT qualifications, in particular the OCR National in ICT, which increased by an order of magnitude between 2007 and 2008, and again between 2008 and 2010. In 2010 the OCR National in ICT accounted for more than a third of all entries to Level 2 ICT and Computing courses taken in schools by students at the end of Key Stage 4. There has been dramatic growth in the popularity of the BTEC First Diploma and First Certificate, too, though in contrast with entries to the OCR National qualifications, in 2010 the numbers of entries to these qualifications accounted for 5% of all entries to all such qualifications. The growth of OCR Nationals can in part be attributed to their previous ‘equivalence’ to more than one GCSE for school league table purposes, despite the perception that they may be easier to achieve. This phenomenon is referred to in Alison Wolf’s review of vocational qualifications99 and has been criticised by the current government; the government has recently consulted on changes to performance tables, including a policy move to ‘counting one subject as “one”’100.
In contrast, it can be calculated from table 5.2 that the numbers of entries to the full GCSE in ICT fell by almost half (47%) between 2007 and 2010. Overall, table 5.2 shows that the number of 15 year olds taking Level 2 ICT and Computing qualifications declined by 1.5% between 2007 and 2010. The true extent of this decline is, however, best appreciated when looked at in the context of changes in school rolls. Decreasing birth rates in England during the 1990s led, since 2005, to falls in the numbers of 11–15 year old secondary school students (figure 5.3). The 5% fall in the population of these students between 2005 and 2011 is similar to the 4% fall recorded in the total number of 15 year olds in England between 2005 and 2009101. Both figures are considerably higher than the falls seen in the percentages taking Level 2 ICT and Computing qualifications. This indicates that the decrease in numbers taking qualifications fell by a lesser extent than might have been expected from the fall in the school roll.
99 Cambridge Assessment 2011 ICT and computing qualifications taken in schools in England 2007-2010. Cambridge: Cambridge Assessment. 100 w ww.education.gov.uk/16to19/qualificationsandlearning/a00192510/performance-table-reform-and-transparency-will-raisestandards-and-end-perverse-incentives 101 Data from the Office for National Statistics, May 2010. 54 Shut down or restart? The way forward for computing in UK schools