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The IT Girls
A report on the Computer Clubs For Girls (CC4G) initiative
By Kim Thomas |
Deborah Forster, headteacher of Trinity School in Newbury, knows all about teenagers: one of their favourite phrases, she says, is "It's not fair." Recently, though, the use of that phrase has made her smile. Why? Because it was spoken by a Year 9 girl, annoyed that she wouldn't be able to carry on attending the all-girls after-school computer club once she was in Year 10. "Whenever you have boys or girls complaining that it's not fair that they can't continue, you know you're on to something," says Deborah.
Trinity School is one of 124 secondary and primary schools taking part in the Computer Clubs For Girls (CC4G) pilot launched in 2002. The programme, developed jointly by the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) and e-skills, the sector skills council for IT, was initiated with the aim of getting 11-14 year-old girls more interested in computers. A nationwide shortage of skilled IT workers has made businesses eager to find ways of recruiting more women into the sector - the proportion of IT employees who are women has dropped steadily, from 25% in the 1980s to 20% today.
MORI research commissioned by e-skills showed that at the age of 10, girls are just as interested in IT as boys, but that between the ages of 11and 14, girls come to see computers as geeky, nerdish and boring. The idea behind CC4G was that, by taking girls out of a mixed-sex environment, and giving them the opportunity to work on IT projects tailored to their interests, such as fashion and celebrity, they would start to see that IT could be fun.
It's worked. Of the 3,500 girls who took part in the pilot, 65% said they were more likely to consider a career in technology, while every single school felt that the clubs had increased the girls' confidence in IT. Backed by £8.4 million from the Government, the scheme is now being extended to schools across England. So far, 550 have enlisted and the aim is to increase that to 3,600 by 2008. The scheme is also receiving private sector support: the CC4G board includes companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Ernst & Young. Some businesses are giving professional advice about courseware development, while others are encouraging employees to volunteer at the clubs. Companies such as Serif, Gael and Idigicon have agreed to donate software.
What has made the pilot so successful? Deborah believes that at Trinity, where 60 girls are enrolled in the club, one factor is simply that boys have been removed from the equation: "Girls often engage with the technology in a way that's slightly different from boys, and the club allows them to work past the hesitance of 'I don't know how to do that' and a boy leaning across and saying 'what you do is this'." The confidence gained by the CC4G girls has carried across into formal IT lessons: "The girls were saying how pleased they are that in their own Key Stage 3 lesson , they were starting to give advice to others, and one girl said, 'I even knew something that a boy didn't know, I told him how to do it.'"
Getting the software right has also been crucial to the clubs' success. The software was designed by e-skills in consultation with a team of educational and technical specialists, and is reviewed regularly after feedback from the schools. Club members can choose from a variety of projects, including designing a magazine cover, designing a garden and creating a fashion show, all topics designed to appeal to young teenage girls. Content in future will be broader, says Melody Herman, CC4G's project director, and will include topics such as crime scene investigation and nature and the environment.
Despite the soft-focus subject matter, the girls are learning some very tangible skills, such as programming, designing websites, creating databases and using the Macromedia Flash authoring tool. At Trinity, children at Key Stage 3 learn to design web pages using FrontPage, but the CC4G girls are allowed to use the more difficult HTML in lessons, because they've learnt how to use it in their club. The confidence the girls have acquired has had a knock-on effect: 87% of the pilot schools said that the girls' performance had improved across the curriculum, not just in IT.
The software itself, accessed via a password-protected website, has been designed to encourage the girls to learn independently, says Melody. Although a teacher attends each club, their role is as a facilitator, not as an ICT expert. (Most of the pilot schools reported that even the CC4G teachers had improved their IT skills by taking part.) If the girls do get stuck, they can use the very comprehensive help system or ask each other. "Instead of sitting waiting for instruction, like they do in an ICT class, the girls have a go - they're more likely to take the lead," says Melody. The girls can work on their projects at home, too, and many do.
The experience of CC4G has been so valuable that Deborah hopes she can extend some of the lessons learnt from it to other areas of the curriculum: "The CC4G model has tapped into so many things that we know work. We're looking now at setting by gender. We're looking at other subjects, such as maths and science to ask how we could use this model to build confidence, encourage risk-taking and enjoyment in subjects where students sometimes are very traditionally saying 'I can't, I don't want to."
CC4G will run until 2008, but it will be several more years before we know whether the clubs have succeeded in attracting more girls into IT. In the meantime, Melody is hoping that e-skills will be able to support the CC4G alumni as they progress through their remaining school careers. Which brings us back to that Year 9 girl at Trinity who thought it wasn't fair that she had to give up CC4G. What will happen to her? Deborah is delighted to report that she's coming back in Year 10 as an official CC4G helper.
July 2005
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