Resources for primary and secondary schools are coming soon!

As Sue Sentance announced in November, we are developing new resources for primary and secondary schools. These resources include schemes of work, lesson plans, activities, and assessments.

Piloting the first unit of work

Over the past half term, we’ve been piloting our first unit of work in primary schools across the country. During the pilot, we asked both specialist and non-specialist teachers of Computing to deliver content related to computing systems and networks to Year 3 children.

We’ve been delighted with the feedback received — particularly the comments from non-specialist teachers, who found that the lesson plans enabled them to deliver the sessions effectively.

For example, one Year 3 teacher wrote:

"The lesson plan was very clear and easy to follow, with added explanations (which I feel I needed) to help with subject knowledge."

We were also very pleased to hear that teachers felt our activities were accessible to children, which enabled them to meet the lesson objectives:

"All the children in my class were able to access the resources for this lesson. [...]The final activity helped show if they understood what they had learnt / met their objective."

We’ve also learnt a great deal from the pilot, as well as from feedback from other teachers and academics. For example, as a result of the feedback, we will ensure a focus on providing clear, age-appropriate definitions of key vocabulary for children, outline further approaches to differentiation, and include additional assessment opportunities.

As the next set of resources is developed, further schools will be involved in piloting content. In time, you will also be able to submit feedback on content via the NCCE website.

Next steps

We are currently writing and piloting content for our next units of work, and will soon be launching our resources via the NCCE website — follow us on Twitter at @WeAreComputing to find out as soon as the resources become available!

About the author

Neil Rickus is the Senior Learning Manager (Primary) at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.