An article from the BBC caught my eye today: Scottish high school pass rates for computer science (CS) could be as low as 10%. That’s pretty worrying.

I’m not suggesting the students are at fault here, and I don’t think that we should use exams as an absolute metric for student capability.

But these are vital figures to highlight and discuss, as they potentially indicate real and serious problems, and further investigation or analysis on these topics would be really helpful:

• How does this relate to success and competence rates at college/university/apprentice CS level? If there’s no correlation, this is just an anomaly and not that worrying. In my experience learning CS at a high school level is vastly different to what is covered at higher levels, so that is possible. But if low success rates are shared, then there needs to be sector wide attention on this.
• Is this because the subject isn’t interesting and engaging enough, or is it because it really is too difficult for high school student to grasp? If it is either of these, then curriculum level change may be needed to resolve the issue, not just arguing about exam results.
• Is this an indicator that the wider scottish student population have poor digital literacy skills (DLS)? If there is evidence of poor DLS, that will impact students across all subjects and needs to be addressed.

I’m also concerned by the response given by the Scottish Government. Their argument is “this isn’t an issue because students sit exams in different year groups” [and the analysis was done on one particular age band]. But that’s wilfully ignoring the point that the students that did want to take the subject and exam this past year did so poorly. If anything the flexibility towards choosing subjects shows that even those students with the most motivation and drive to do well are struggling.

Going forward I think we really need to look closely at all aspects of DLS (with an awareness that not all students will want or need to be competent in all of them) because this tech is already central in pretty much every industry, and so will be key to employability. A healthy awareness of DLS (not necessarily a mastery of CS) is also vital to challenge narratives around AI, Crypto, Privacy, and other tech risks, which is vital for keeping society safe.