Computing is at the forefront of a rapidly changing world and our children need the skills to cope with this and be able to participate in the digital world. Computers are an important part of everyday life – and are incorporated into all aspects of everyday life.

At Birch Hill, we aim to provide the pupils with experiences and learning in all three aspects of the computing curriculum – Computer Science (CS), Information Technology (IT) and Digital Literacy (DL).

As well as computing as a subject, we believe computers are valuable tools to further enhance and aid all areas of the curriculum. All technologies are seen as a tool to capture the pupil’s interest and increase motivation to learn. To this end, computing should enrich and support all areas of learning.

The teaching of computing enables pupils to understand the principles of information and computation; how digital systems work and how to put some of this knowledge to use through programming.

We aim for our curriculum to help pupils develop the necessary skills, in an effective way, to support them in this continuously advancing technological world.

National Curriculum Aims

The national curriculum for computing aims to ensure that all pupils:

• can understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation
• can analyse problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems
• can evaluate and apply information technology, including new or unfamiliar technologies, analytically to solve problems
• are responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology.

Delivery

At Birch Hill we use 2Simple’ Scheme of Work and their Purple Mash tool to teach computing. This progressively builds on the children’s understanding and use of computing and includes all three aspects of the curriculum – computer science, information technology, and digital literacy.  Please see our Scheme of Work overview below.

We also have included a useful Parenting in a Digital World guide.