A number of the largest tech companies, including Google, O2, Microsoft and IBM, will help the UK government to train primary school teachers who are supposed to deliver the UK’s new computing curriculum. According to the UK education secretary, 5 new training projects are planned, with funding required of the £3.1m for training schemes.
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A number of the tech giants decided to take a part in the action: for example, Google is co-funding publishing of 16,000 booklets on “computing-related thinking” for teachers and developing the tool to teach programming, contributing £25,000 to the project and funding computing teacher-training scholarships for another £25,000. Microsoft, IBM and Facebook did the same.

As for O2, the company is providing £50,000 of funding for a new system of badges to reward teachers who improve their skills in teaching programming. This system may reflect the technology industry’s enthusiasm for “gamification” of the education system. It turned out that the teachers would have to complete badge missions tasks and challenges and provide evidence of their skill development to claim badges.

Other tech firms also took part in the action, with Raspberry Pi providing £42,000 funding for the program of events for computing teachers and Titan Partnership running a computer science training program.

The UK education secretary acknowledged that a significant number of jobs in the future is expected to be in the tech industry, which is why the tech giants are invited to participate and prepare young people to succeed in the global race. It was also stated that more training is undoubtedly required. Of course, the tech industry welcomed the new computing curriculum of the United Kingdom when it was introduced back in 2014, including programming lessons for 5-year-olds.

On the other hand, many critics have argued that majority of the teachers were unprepared for the changes, because many of them had never learned programming themselves. Now the critics are questioning the role large tech firms should play in the UK education system. In respond, their training partners argue that tapping tech industry and government funding is very important for the United Kingdom, particularly as the new curriculum has already been introduced.