IT teachers: Under-funded and under-skilled?

UK schools are ill-equipped to teach IT, according to recent research, despite official government figures released yesterday showing that IT expenditure in the education system has hit record highs.

The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) revealed yesterday that the average secondary school spent £76,000 on IT in the past year, and boasts a pupil to computer ratio of 6:1.

However, a different survey has now claimed the UK education sector is still under-funded and cited dissatisfaction among teachers who claim not enough is being done to teach IT in schools.

According to research commissioned by the National Computing Day campaign, 80 per cent of teachers believe the government should make IT investment for schools more of a priority, while the same proportion believe better IT facilities would improve the quality of their teaching.

Despite DfES figures which suggest 80 per cent of teachers are confident using IT, this latest survey says 70 per cent of teachers actually blame their local education authority for what they see as a lack of proper IT training.

The response of silicon.com reader Steve Princep to our original story on the DfES statistics (see http://www.silicon.com/a55325 for more), would certainly seem to support the accusations of a lack of training.

He said: "Having rolled out an NT network to a college in Guildford and having met the so-called IT teacher - who incidentally could not remember the procedure for setting up a new user on NT4 from one side of the weekend to the other after already creating about 300 new users - I for one will be teaching my own kids about the finer details of things IT."

National Computing Day is to be held on Friday 4 October 2002. Its intention is to highlight the benefits of computing and to make it more accessible to everybody. One major issue being championed will be the promotion of computer recycling.