FEATURE: VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
Reaching for the stars Tell us about your schools I
n this month’s ever popular View from the classroom feature we are delighted to hear from Nicola Jane Buttigieg, Head of Computer Science, Sutton High School Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST) & GDST Space Technology Programme Lead, who tells us about the school’s Computer science curriculum and the Trust-wide Space Technology A-level extension programme.
July/August 2023
Sutton High School, a member school of the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST), offers an all-through education from ages 3-18, designed for and dedicated to the development and empowerment of successful, happy, confident, and adventurous young women. The school and its staff are passionate about girls feeling free to make informed and unconstrained decisions in a safe and inspiring environment. The school is non-denominational and has increased its capacity in recent years. It currently has 850 day students on role, with a typical class size reaching 22 students in the senior school, and six students in the Sixth Form. The school’s values of courage, truth and joy are at the heart of everything the school does, encouraging the girls to have self- belief and to find joy in learning. Entrance procedure to the school is by interview and test, and the GDST Trust runs an empowering programme of means- tested bursaries.
What is the current uptake of Computer Science at Sutton High School and what specification do you teach?
We deliver the OCR GCSE and OCR A-level Computer Science specifications at Sutton High School. When I arrived at the school mid-pandemic during September 2020, there were no A-level
computer science students on roll. I inherited five Year 11 students studying for the GCSE. The next year I saw seven GCSE students through the exam and this year it has grown to eleven. Next year I will have twenty students coming through the OCR GCSE spec. My first A-level student has started in Year 12 this year, and next year I have six students enrolled to commence the OCR A level spec.
What is the Computer Science curriculum language provision at Sutton High School? We focus on practising Python programming language and incorporate this as a long term unit throughout our KS3 Computer Science curriculum. We choose to practise Python for its hybrid programming ability and because it is versatile and easy to learn. As a language, Python is also an attractive choice, as it is seen as a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of languages. Even though it may not end up being the choice language for everything in industry, it has installation libraries that can allow it to facilitate a great diversity of application types. However, due to time constraints, the curriculum and assessment that this topic deserves are unable to be accounted for formally within the school timetable. Particularly at A-level, this topic incorporates the valuable upskilling additions of automated operations programming (becoming more essential to support engineering
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