Informatics Education in Europe: Are We All in the Same Boat? [Full PDF report]
Informatics Europe and the ACM Europe Council set up and funded in 2013 a Committee on European Computing Education (CECE) to undertake a study that would capture the state of Informatics education across the countries of Europe. This was seen to parallel the highly influential US study “Running on Empty”. It gathered data from 55 administrative units (countries, nations, and regions) of Europe (plus Israel) with autonomous educational systems, using questionnaires and a wide network of reliable contacts and official sources.
A report on that work was published in 2017, with an unprecedented level of detail and information: Informatics Education in Europe: Are We All in the Same Boat?. While the report confirmed that across Europe there is a growing awareness of the importance of offering young students the opportunity of sound education in Informatics, it also showed a highly variable level of effort and achievement across countries and education autonomous regions.
The CECE report identified that the provision of Informatics education was quite uneven across Europe: only in 22 out of 50 educational regions was Informatics available to all pupils; in a further 10 regions it was available to just some students; in several noticeable cases no Informatics teaching was available at all. When students could elect for Informatics there was evidence of poor uptake, often as low as 10%.
In particular, the report showed that in several countries/regions, students can graduate from secondary schools without having ever been exposed even to the basic principles of Informatics. On the basis of this and other findings, the first and foremost recommendation was that all students must have access to ongoing education in Informatics in the school system. Informatics teaching should start in primary school.
The major CECE report on the state of art of education in Informatics, Digital Literacy, and Teacher Training in these disciplines in Europe can be downloaded here: Informatics Education in Europe: Are We All in the Same Boat?
The report is supplemented by an online map (cece-map.informatics-europe.org) where the results of the study can be explored visually and interactively.