Head of Department

Subject Teachers

Our Curriculum Intent

KS3

Our KS3 curriculum, year 7 to 9, intents to provide students with the key skills and knowledge of computing disciplines. The scheme of work has been designed to ensure that it is relevant to the modern, ever changing digital world and designed to boost computing skills essential for the 21st century. Students will not only learn how computers work, but how to program them. The topics covered will adequately prepare them for progression into GCSE courses offered by the department.  

KS4

Our GCSE in Computer Science builds on our KS3 curriculum. Relevant to the modern, changing world of computing, it’s designed to boost computing skills essential for the 21st century.

The OCR specification focuses on:

• Computational thinking as its core, helping students to develop the skills to solve problems, design systems and understand human and machine intelligence

• Applying the academic principles they learn in the classroom to real-world systems in an exciting and engaging way

• Giving students a clear progression into higher education, as the course was designed after consultation with members of BCS, CAS and top universities.

KS5

The content of this qualification has been developed in consultation with academics to ensure that it incorporates the most up-to-date knowledge and skills to enable progression to higher education. It allows students to gain fundamental knowledge and skills in computer science, computer systems, IT security and game design & development. This will enable students to progress to broader or more specialist study such as a BTEC Higher National in a computing discipline, a degree in a computing discipline or a degree where computing-related skills and knowledge may be advantageous, such as business studies.

What Will Students Learn In Each Year?

The links below give a detailed breakdown of what is taught in the the curriculum for each year.

Accommodation and Resources

The computing department has five dedicated purpose built rooms. The rooms are all very spacious and all have between 24 and 28 computers, printing facilities, teacher stations and interactive boards. The school also has an ethos of ensuring IT resources are based in other departments to allow IT to be taught across the curriculum as well as supporting the delivering of those subjects. To this end there are 11 Laptop Trolleys and a further 6 dedicated network rooms, in all there are approximately 850 computers in the school for students to use. The school has an extensive networked infrastructure which links the whole site back to the main IT office. The school is also fully covered by a managed wireless network. All teaching staff have laptops that are used for electronic registration and teaching.

Extra Curricular Activities

In the ICT department we open the ICT rooms up at lunchtimes and after school for students to continue with work or to develop new skills.

Extended Opportunities For Learning

All computing courses are based on the schools Learning Platform. This is used to set and assess student work. Students can access this information from any computer that has internet access. The department also runs regular workshops to support KS4 and KS5 students. All students also have access to remote desktop from any internet connected devices giving them access to their work and many of the schools software packages.