The Computing department at Whitworth Community High School aims to equip students with the skills to participate in a rapidly-changing world through challenging and engaging practical and theoretical topics. Students will develop an understanding and application in the fundamental principles of Computing by having the opportunity to write programs, design webpages and produce professional digital products.

The national curriculum for Computing aims to ensure that all students:

• can understand & apply the fundamental principles & concepts of computing, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation
• can analyse problems computationally, & 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.

All stakeholders are clear in how the subject is delivered, ensuring our students leave with the skills to fully embrace a future of rapidly advancing computer technology. Computing skills are a major factor in enabling children to be confident, creative and independent learners and it is our intention that children have every opportunity available to allow them to achieve this.

Our approach to teaching and learning supports our curriculum by ensuring that lessons build on prior learning and provide sufficient opportunity for guided and independent practice. We use Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction (2012) to develop our teaching practice:

• Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning
• Present new material in small steps with student practise after each step
• Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students
• Provide models
• Guide student practice
• Check for student understanding
• Obtain a high success rate
• Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks
• Require and monitor independent practice
• Engage students in weekly and monthly review

The intention is that this will lead to making progress in the following areas:

• Increased student capacity and resilience 
• Reduction in gender imbalance
• Student collaboration and digital leaders
• Innovators through a love of programming

Computing Programme of Study 2021-2022