Please do not return to the noughties.
I was doing my GCSEs in the late ‘00s, a couple of years before the computer science GCSE was introduced. They were a complete joke and I really hope they don’t return to them.
For the coursework, we had to produce a children’s book (okay?), in the natural tool for the job, Powerpoint. When I immediately questioned this (we even had access to publisher, which I had used as far back as year 6), I was simply told to shut up and do it in powerpoint, which I did. My coursework (60% of the grade) was on track for an E and I had no idea how to improve it as the tasks were so fundamentally broken. I just wanted to get out of school, so I asked my teacher “If I get every question right in the exam, will I get a C”. He said “Yes, but don’t count on it.”
I did the exam in half an hour. It was all questions about dated hardware like floppy disks. (I was already years into building my own PCs at this stage, so the hardware side of stuff was child's play) I did it in half the allotted time and got my C in the end.
The IT GCSE was actually far less in depth than the IT skills I had done in KS2. (We were doing excel formulas back then, almost programming!) I still use those skills, it’s worth teaching in order to get familiarity with general computer tasks. However it’s not enough to really understand what is going on, just as primary school maths isn’t considered enough to get you into any job.
I accept the world is different now. A friend worked in IT at a school until a couple of years ago and he said as time went on, more and more kids lacked basic knowledge of computers and had to be taught things like how to use a mouse. They had all just had touchscreens only their entire lives and it wasn’t until secondary school that they sat in front of a desktop pc.
Not that it is an insurmountable problem, the first computers I used also had no mice, because they were BBC Micros.
I think the answer is to teach the basic user skills early, but by GCSE you should really be learning how these things actually work and how to write your own software.