UK government response to my letter about programming in schools

As for budget the letter was trying to address that, and got ignored - the cheap computer project. Part of the issue I think.

Programming, at its base, is really a method for understanding and defining a process. It's about breaking a big task down into its component pieces. It's about turning one large, nearly intractable problem into a series of easily understood and fundamentally soluable problems.

If programming is taught in this context, with an emphasis on methods for problem-solving in general rather than language syntax in particular, its utility in the everyday life of the average person becomes a lot more obvious. I used simple programming as a part of a worker re-education program that included basic literacy and numeracy, and it proved to be very effective in the overall success of the students -- even with no expectation that programming would play a part in their later lives. It made other things easier for them to do, and if that's the only value that the "average" student gets out of a programming course, it seems like enough, doesn't it?

I don't know much about either John Graham-Cumming or Michael Gove personally. I do know that this is a long and, dare I say, rather rambling e-mail, which to me reads more like a lecture written to look good for a public audience than a sincere request for action by a government minister. Perhaps that is just my natural scepticisim talking -- I have no reason to believe that John actually meant it that way, and I have nothing against him based on his comments on HN -- but keep in mind that civil servants have finely tuned senses about such writing, because a lot of the people who send it are trying to set the minister up in one way or another.

A more practical problem is that the original e-mail contains almost no actionable content. The only specific detail is Raspberry Pi, which is not mentioned until the second half of the message and by the author's own description is not yet ready. Given how many doomed government IT projects surely get described as "close to completion" right up until they fail with a multi-million-pound write-off, it would hardly be surprising if no senior government figure wanted to be associated with something potentially toxic like that at this stage.

Even if the minister were willing to take a look, if it is indeed contrary to government policy to promote such specific details on a national basis, then there is little the responding civil servant can do to help except explain what the policy is and who might be able to help instead, which they did. Multi-level governments inherently set rules for which matters are to be handled at which levels, and it is futile to propose deviating from such fundamental rules in isolated cases like this.

I suspect John's intended point might have been more about the benefits of teaching kids to code in general, but I'm afraid that just doesn't come across from the message unless your audience is likely to read between the lines (see my comment about public audience above). In any case, while it may be a perfectly reasonable position to take, nothing in the e-mail suggests any specific action the minister could take to further that goal, so at best it is going to achieve a +1 in an "issues of interest" spreadsheet and a courtesy reply.

I do love the final comment, asking for a personal meeting with a secretary of state based on a quick e-mail, though. You've got to love someone with the chops to go for that right from the start. Maybe I just went to the wrong university... :-)

I have a particular problem with it: the response to "this subject ought to be included in the curriculum" was "we aren't the ones to make that change, all we do is decide what's in the curriculum."