... the other A level scandal ...

I used to teach computing to 16 to 19 year students. The move from the National Diploma to vocational qualifications GNVQs - based around NVQs (national vocational qualifications) was a disaster for the students - as it concentrated on paperwork - being very prescriptive - and changing lecturing from being a creative, with some flexibility - to a bureaucratic nightmare.

More seriously the information technology modules seemed to be designed to make the subject as boring as possible. Instead of teaching students how to program - we had units of programming appreciation. No longer could a student write a brilliant program hundreds or thousands of lines long - and then appreciate that by using a procedure - he could save a lot of typing and at the same time the program was more readable. This discovery would quickly be told to the rest of the class and at the end of two years about a third of the class could get technical work - most would go onto university - extremely well prepared - and generally could knock the spots of most A level students when it came to techie parts of the course. In a class of twenty around 16 would go into a technical or computing career.

With programming - making mistakes - developing input screens with bright green, purple and blue input screens - and in the case one student developed an ascii combat program - with blood and heads being knocked off - and another built his own Windows interface in turbo Pascal. There was time to experiment and build up confidence - build up skills and gave the students a wide experience of programming - and the experience of working as part of a programming development team - as well as learning - by making mistakes - why design - and a professional approach was needed. It also allowed the lecturer the flexibility to encourage the good students - who usually needed just pointing in a direction - and spend time with the weaker - less confident students .

The GNVQ with its small modules forced us to teach modules on procedures - so our students - could copy the definition of a procedure from page 253 of the text book - and hand it in with the other 32 definitions they needed to have ticked off - to pass the module. They could steal examples of procedures from course materials - but there was not time - or structure - for the students to experiment. Although I improved the course slightly - by giving the students the option to deliver the reports in web format - and using a primitive ascii based adventure game to demonstrate techniques - the kids were not stupid - they knew the structure was crap - and so I changed from computer lecturer - to wordprocessing teacher - nagging students to produce report after report - or drill sergeant making them do simple exercise after simple exercise -so boxes could be ticked.

The result was that only around 6 of the larger classes of 24 would go into a computing related career - and the rest had been put off a techie career. No one could leave a GNVQ course and be useful to an employer - so it was only the students - that did work at home - who had this option. So the country loses approximately 10 technicians or programmers per GNVQ class a year - which I estimate is at least 5,000 per annum.

The new A level A/S are even worse

OK lets forget that most schools and college still insist on using turbo Pascal - which is so old it is impossible to buy - except second hand - well - to be truthful there is some move towards visual basic and a few colleges do C. And lets not forget that no school or college is going to pay for a teacher or lecturer to learn up to date skills - we need to spend the money - and time - on training on government policies - building structures for Investors in People - learning how to bull the forms to get your performance related pay.

In the old A level structure a student has five terms to learn programming - develop their skills - and develop a significant programming project. In the current structure students do one project a year - which has to be marked in Easter - so that 's an initial reduction of 20% practical programming over a period of two years.

In the first year students are given some form of programming exercise to do. Only around a quarter of the student group - the nerds -have the background and motivation to do these exercise. So a lecturer is forced to teach - only to getting the students through the exercises - this means giving the students around 90% of the answer - and training them just to modify the programming examples given out in class. It also means that the genuine student who tries to learn programming - or has the initiative to try and do it independently will often make a mistake - and get a lower grade.

So there is no training students to design - or training to use procedures properly - and it narrows the course down - making the majority of students bad hackers - with little idea of what they doing - and making a lot of students rethink their career choices - again losing Britain a substantial number of technical people.

The second year A level requires the students to produce a substantial programming project - again in two terms - which again means a cobbled together program - using other people's code - and often concentrating on the documentation. The stress on the students is higher than on many other A level course and effectively if the lecturers and teachers did not come close to cheating and giving more help than the exam boards' guidelines - then at least two thirds of each class would fail or get very low grades.

So the result of the new A level structure is that it puts off a substantial number of potential recruits to the computing industries and many of the grades are achieved by teaching staff bending the rules.

I estimate that the new vocational A level and the new academic A level are losing this country around 100,000 computing specialists, network technicians and other technical recruits per year. I worry what the bureaucrats will do next.