Scottish Labour pledges coding lessons for children starting primary school

Children as young as five will get coding lessons from the year they start school under Scottish Labour plans to tap into job opportunities in the technology sector.

Leader Kezia Dugdale included a series of proposals in the party’s Scottish Parliament manifesto designed to prepare youngsters for the “new fast-changing world of work”.

The manifesto, launched yesterday in Edinburgh, pledges to mirror work being done south of the border by putting primary school teachers through coding courses.

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The party has also promised to establish an annual national schools coding competition “to showcase Scottish talent and further develop the skills of the future”.  

Coding, which involves creating and scripting instructions to run computer programmes, is now being taught in English primary schools after a shake-up of the national curriculum two years ago saw computing replace ICT.

A study commissioned by Ocado Technology last year found that the programming language Python had become the most popular language taught in primary schools.  

The Labour manifesto says: “To prepare our children for the new fast-changing world of work, we will establish a nationwide initiative to introduce first-class education in IT and computer coding in all schools.

“We will fund primary school teachers to go on a basic coding course to allow schools to introduce this to pupils from Primary 1, as they currently do in England.”

The party also intends to establish a “software development and coding apprenticeship path” after a sharp drop in further education computing enrolments.

Forecasts suggest Scotland’s digital sector needs 11,000 new entrants a year to meet rising demand. Scotland’s first digital skills academy, CodeClan, opened last year with students going through a 16-week course that will culminate in a Professional Development Award in Software Development.