Being a Head of Department
These stories explore the experience of leading a computing department while navigating accountability structures, including work scrutiny, curriculum expectations, and institutional evaluation. Teachers describe moments where the realities of physical computing — experimentation, iteration, and debugging — sit uneasily alongside systems designed to measure learning through static artefacts. In these situations, leadership becomes an interpretive act: balancing institutional demands with a commitment to meaningful computing education.
Pete
I first became a teacher before drop-ins or work scrutinies to justify everything you do became a thing. Nowadays, there is much more pressure for teachers' plans and students' work to be examined by their head of department or a leadership team member, and any freedom we once had has ebbed away a little now.
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I have already completed work scrutiny across the computing department and drop-ins to observe four colleagues teaching this term. We may get a deep dive as a department, with books or work called for, and it's that thing of someone looking who doesn't understand the computing curriculum. We never had to worry about it as a department until about three years ago. We were ripped to hell by work scrutiny when the feedback was, ‘You have no work to show, and you can't prove anything; it's crap,’ so yeah.
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A big challenge in planning physical computing lessons is to prove that we are teaching something new and that students have understood it. We have used little code diaries and debugging activities to demonstrate progress and learning. Still, teachers must put a lot of effort into a basic activity to prove that students have done something over time, including the skills they learn and the level of challenge that increases. You are always aware that someone is looking at your planning and saying, ‘Well, if you just give them instructions on how to do something and they just do it, there is no evidence.’
Pete
Work scrutiny only considers students' work, and as a head of the department, I do this away from the classroom, purely based on what is written in students' books or in an electronic format.
In addition, it is challenging to show the impact of teaching and progress over time with physical computing because teachers need to document students' progress, which is much easier to see in an observation.
At least with a drop-in, I can go into a lesson for 15 minutes and get a feel for learning in the classroom, what the environment is like, how students are engaged, and what they pick up much more easily. That is undoubtedly a challenge between the two and not something you can quickly tell through work scrutiny.
With a Python programming unit, students have task sheets and code. I also get them to document the code and what is running. It is harder for a series of physical computing lessons because it takes longer for students to do things.
When I think about using micro:bits, the first lesson is just getting used to downloading and running something to the device, so is there any learning there?
Probably not, it's just a procedural thing with little knowledge, and that's the same for robots we use with another platform.
And when we get to the following lessons, teachers might not have the pace they want because everything takes a little more time with the additional steps involved in running things.
Pete
There has been much more pressure to ensure that our lower school curriculum equips students with what they need to move into KS4, so we have changed our year nine curriculum to serve as a precursor to GCSE Computer Science.
I want to teach more physical computing lessons in Y9 after the half-term in May when we have built up enough evidence for progress and done the more traditional stuff. That is when we don't worry so much about going through work scrutinies, and students can have the time to be practical and enjoy it.
For most students in Y9, this will be their last experience in computing. Finishing with something hands-on, a little more practical, and not worrying about a theoretical aspect is nice.
Pete
I remember using BitBlox in one of my year nine classes in the summer. It was the end of the year, so I didn't have to plan that lesson, and I just went:
‘Right, here's your circuit; you have to go here, here and here. Here's your bot, there's your environment – go’.
But I knew no one would come in and observe me; no one would look at their books, so I could just let them tinker and play.
While I am now thinking about how we will teach with micro:bits next term or how we might have to prove robotics in the future, I must look at the rounder picture, which shows more to someone else who is probably not an expert in this field.
I must show that it is worthwhile and that the children are learning something.