| field | description | Total | Boy | Girl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| xchc_career | Doesn’t fit with my future study/career plans | 48.9% | 39.3% | 55.5% |
| xchc_enjoy | I don’t find it interesting/enjoyable | 65.4% | 53.2% | 73.9% |
| xchc_family | What my parents/carers and family think | 3.6% | 5.2% | 2.5% |
| xchc_homecomputer | I don't have the computing resources at home | 8.4% | 11.5% | 6.3% |
| xchc_marks | I don’t get good marks | 27.3% | 24.6% | 29.1% |
| xchc_maths | I find the maths difficult | 27.1% | 19.4% | 32.4% |
| xchc_nooption | I was not allowed to take it | 6.2% | 9.1% | 4.1% |
| xchc_other | Other (please specify below, optional) | 16.6% | 22.6% | 12.4% |
| xchc_peers | What my friends/peers think | 3.6% | 4.8% | 2.7% |
| xchc_repet | I find it repetitive | 26.0% | 24.2% | 27.2% |
| xchc_similarpeers | There are not enough 'people like me' | 5.0% | 5.6% | 4.7% |
| xchc_teacher | The teacher/one of my teachers | 8.6% | 9.1% | 8.2% |
| xchc_timetable | It doesn't fit with my other subject choices (e.g. timetable) | 22.7% | 24.2% | 21.7% |
| xchc_toomuch | There is a lot to learn/remember | 28.4% | 27.0% | 29.4% |
‘Having a butchers’ at how timetabling issues influence secondary school computer science subject choice
Abstract
This article questions the conclusions of research into the importance of timetabling issues in the uptake of GCSE computer science, particularly as given as a reason for girls not taking the subject. It proposes a butcher’s apprentice model for ranking the reasons given by students not taking a subject, where there is a hierarchy of reasons given, with some reasons out ranking others. In the case of computer science, it proposes that lack of enjoyment and interest in the subject is a more important reason given by students for not taking CS than timetabling issues.
The study of a survey of 661 secondary school children in 15 state mixed schools across England finds that even though boys and girls listed timetabling as a reason for not choosing CS in roughly equal proportions (24% to 22%), boys were more likely than girls to list timetabling issues as the only reason for not taking GCSE computer science (4% to 1%). When looking at students giving timetabling issues as a reason for not picking CS and not mentioning lack enjoyment and interest in the subject, boys were again more likely than girls to give this response (13% to 7%). Our findings suggest that research might be overstating the impact of timetabling issues on the uptake of computer science, particularly for girls. We recommend that future work in this area should allow students to rank the reasons given for not taking a subject.
Background
Asking for reasons for a student picking or not picking a subject at school might be an imprecise tool. Consider this analogy: a local butchery firm might be looking how to increase the number of butcher’s apprentices and asks a person:
“why aren’t you studying to be a butcher?”
With the reasons given by a potential student being:
“childcare commitments mean I can’t get out of the house early enough for the opening of the meat markets” and “I don’t enjoy butchery [as I’m vegan]”
We might conclude that to get more people working as butchers we need to provide better childcare support - this would help mitigate of the barrier to attending the morning meat markets. But this solution ignores the more important reason given by the participant above for not wanting to become a butcher, that they are a vegan and don’t enjoy butchery. This article explores how a hierarchy of reasons given by a student for GCSE subject choice might change our understanding of how timetabling issues are stopping students in England taking GCSE computer science.
In England students often get to pick some of the subjects they study at key stage 4, age 14-16, with the main exam type being the General Certificate in Secondary Education (GCSE). Schools commonly put subjects into blocks and students can only pick one subject from each block. This can lead to students not being able to pick the subjects they want to study. For example a school might put computer science and art in the same block, meaning a student who is fonder of art than computer science will opt to study art, and in practice have their freedom to take a computer science qualification restricted. Timetabling issues have been posited as one of the main reasons for poor uptake of computer science amongst girls, with a £2.4m Department for Education (DfE) funded research project into Gender Balance in Computing listing timetabling as one of its main lines of research (Raspberry Pi 2018; Behavioural Insights Team 2022; Ryles-Hodges, Krieger, and Chasdeesingh 2022).
Recently the SCARI computing project found that 24% of boys and 22% of girls listed timetabling issues - “It doesn’t fit with my other subject choices (e.g. timetable)” - as a reason for not taking GCSE computer science, a difference that was not statistically significant (Kemp et al. 2024). This result was similar to the findings of Hingley et al. (2023) which reported 25% of all students in a DfE survey giving timetabling as the reason for not taking GCSE CS. However, timetabling is not the only reason students might choose not to pick a subject, and whilst the literature offers the frequency of reasons for why a student might not be taking CS, it doesn’t tell us about rankings or interactions between the reasons given. Might we have a situation like the butcher’s apprentice example described above, where students list timetabling as a secondary point - i.e. they couldn’t take computer science if they wanted to, but they really didn’t want to study it anyway, even if they could.
NB: In cockney rhyming slang, a “butchers [hook]” is another way of saying “look”, as “butcher’s hook” rhymes with “look”. So “having a butchers [hook]” means “having a look”.
Methodology
The SCARI computing research project worked with 15 schools across England during 2021 and 2022 which had better than average GCSE computer science uptake. Nearly 4,000 students were surveyed, including students in years 10 and 11 (age 14-16) who had not opted to take the GCSE in computer science. These girls (n=376) and boys (n=285) were asked their reasons for not doing so.
For all analysis, those students who gave no responses to the question were filtered out, as this suggests they skipped the question - 33 (11.6%) boys and 12 (3.2%) girls were removed from the data set.
Students picked from the following options:
Table 1 shows that the most popular reason for girls and boys was “I don’t find it interesting/enjoyable” with 65% of all students giving this as a reason for not taking the qualification.
Taking the butcher’s apprentice example above as a model of reasoning, we presume that someone saying that they do not enjoy a course would not want to take the course, even if their timetable allowed it. Therefore, to gather the true impact of timetabling on subject choice we will remove a student listing timetabling and lack of enjoyment at the same time from those that mention timetabling, as we take lack of enjoyment as the primary reason. The relationship between other factors and timetabling are less clear, for example, a student whose family disapproves of the subject might still opt to take it if timetabling allowed, as might a student for whom the study of computer science wouldn’t support their career aspirations, they might opt to take the subject anyway.
We report, for girls and boys, the percentage of students who list timetabling as an issue for not taking GCSE who also do not list lack of enjoyment.
We report the number of students of each gender who listed timetabling as the only reason they didn’t opt to study GCSE computer science. These students seem likely to have taken the subject if timetabling issues had not constrained their choice.
Finally, we report the interaction between different answers, giving the percentage of students who listed each reason for not taking GCSE computer science in combination with each of the otehr reasons. This allows us to see the most common interactions between reasons.
We will provide chi-square difference tests on each group to see if there are any gendered differences in responses.
Findings
The data shows that the groups of girls and boys in the survey gave different numbers of reasons as to why they didn’t want to study GCSE CS, with girls typically giving slightly more reasons (M=3.1 SD=2) than boys (M=2.8 SD=2.4).
Table 2 shows that 3 (0.8%) girls out of 364 gave timetabling as the only reason for not taking the GCSE, whilst 9 (3.2%) boys out of 252 gave timetabling as the only reason. Substantially lower than the 24.2% and 21.7% who gave timetabling as a reason alongside other reasons. Additionally, when conducting a chi-square test on the responses to this question there is a statistically significant difference between the responses given by girls and the responses given by boy Χ2(1, N = 616) = 4.533, p = 0.033.
| gender | overall |
total timetable
|
only timetable
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| total | % | total | % | ||
| Boy | 252 | 61 | 24.2% | 9 | 3.6% |
| Girl | 364 | 79 | 21.7% | 3 | 0.8% |
The question now turns to how many students gave the butcher’s apprentice response of a timetable clash along with not enjoying the subject? Here we see another gender split, with 7.1% of girls giving timetabling whilst also not mentioning that lack of enjoyment was a reason for not taking the subject. The number of boys giving this type of response is higher, at 12.7%. This difference between genders is statistically significant Χ2(1, N = 616) = 4.757, p = 0.029.
| gender | overall |
total timetable
|
without not enjoyable
|
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| total | % | total | % of timetable | % of overall | ||
| Boy | 252 | 61 | 24.2 | 32 | 52.5 | 12.7 |
| Girl | 364 | 79 | 21.7 | 26 | 32.9 | 7.1 |
Reading Figure 2 by taking columns from left to right we can see that 61% of girls who listed lack of enjoyment as a reason for not opting for GCSE computer science also stated that it “Doesn’t fit with my future study/career plans”, compared to 54% of boys. When looking at timetabling - “It doesn’t fit with my other subject choices (e.g. timetable)”, we can see that this reason was highly correlated with several other reasons for not taking the subject, including: 43% xchc_toomuch, 32% xchc_repet, 42% xchc_maths, 44% xchc_marks, 67% xchc_enjoy and 70% xchc_career.
Limitations
- The data from the SCARI computing project was for students who were attending schools with higher than average uptake of GCSE computer science, one of the reasons for this higher uptake might have been that timetable choices were more supportive of the uptake of GCSE computer science, and the number of students giving timetabling as a reason for not studying the subject might be reduced because of this.
- For some students, the subjects that clash with computer science might have been less enjoyable than computer science, but they decided to take them instead of CS because they conformed with family pressures or career aspirations. For these students the hierarchy imposed in the above analysis would misrepresent the order of reasons for not taking the subject.
Conclusion
This short article looks at the reasons given by girls and boys for not taking GCSE computer science. We find that girls typically gave more reasons for not taking the subject than boys when asked the same question.
We use a model of reasoning where we assume that a student’s enjoyment of a subject is more important than timetabling issues - when a student lists both timetabling and lack of enjoyment together as reasons for not taking the subject at the same time we assume that timetabling is a secondary reason. If this model is correct then the number of boys and girls giving timetabling as a major reason for not taking the subject drops substantially from 24% and 22%, to just 12.7% and 7.1% respectively. With boys significantly more likely to mention timetabling in this scenario than girls.
We also find that boys were significantly more likely than girls to list timetabling as the only reason for not taking the subject, with 3.2% of boys and 0.8% girls giving this response. These findings suggest that timetabling issues are not as serious an issue for the uptake of computer science as literature suggests, and where timetabling issues are present, they affect boys more than girls.
The issues raised by the butcher’s apprentice model could be solved by the ranking of reasons in national surveys such as the one conducted by the DfE (Hingley et al. 2023) and the Royal Society and Engineering UK (previously Wellcome Trust) Science Education Tracker (Hamlyn et al. 2024). Future work on subject choice reasoning for computer science needs to allow students to signify the relative importance of items they select.
References
Behavioural Insights Team. 2022. “Gender Balance in Computing: Subject Choice Exploratory Research (Unpublished Report).”
Hamlyn, Becky, Leo Brownstein, Alex Shepherd, Jacob Stammers, and Charlotte Lemon. 2024. “Science Education Tracker 2023 - Wave 3.” Royal Society and Engineering UK: London. https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/science-education-tracker/science-education-tracker-2023.pdf.
Hingley, Sarah, Emily Gaskell, John Morris, Will Lane, Nick Coleman, Charlotte Man, and Alex Thornton. 2023. “Parent, Pupil and Learner Panel 22/23 June Wave.” London, England: Department for Education. 2023. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/652d1a79697260000dccf85a/Parent__Pupil_and_Learner_Panel_22-23_June_wave.pdf.
Kemp, Peter Edward Joseph, Billy Wong, Jessica MM Hamer, and Megan Copsey-Blake. 2024. “The Future of Computing Education - Considerations for Policy, Curriculum and Practice.” https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ecs/assets/kcl-scari-computing.pdf.
Raspberry Pi. 2018. “Gender Balance in Computing.” https://www.raspberrypi.org/research/gender-balance-in-computing/.
Ryles-Hodges, Julia, Michelle Krieger, and Lal Chasdeesingh. 2022. “Gender Balance in Computing: Options Evenings and Booklets.” The Behavioural Insights Team. https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/research/Gender-Balance-in-Computing-Research-Report-Options-evenings-and-booklets.pdf.