Although many great pioneers of computing were women, across the UK computer science is an overwhelmingly male-dominated subject and workforce. At GCSE, there is a 20% uptake from girls, 2017. At A level, there is only a 9% uptake from girls, and this has not changed for many years.

Here at Royal High School Bath, we are committed to giving girls the opportunity to help address the gender imbalance and create confident and knowledgeable girls to help pave the way for the future.

Girls have the opportunity at KS3 to experience a variety of applications which include not only MS Office software but also coding using Scratch, Python, HTML and JavaScript. We also use practical tasks to teach about logic, binary and algorithms. This is a creative and fun curriculum, which combines art, maths and computer science whilst encouraging competition through playing games.

We offer both GCSE Computer Science and ECDL so that students can opt for the qualification which suits them best. In Computer Science, we encourage students to take control of the computer to create programs, and in ICT we ensure that our girls have the necessary digital literacy skills to participate in the modern workplace.

We enter the University of Oxford’s BEBRAS computational thinking competition every year, along with the UK Schools Computer Animation Competition, GCHQ CyberFirst girls competition and Google Code-in. This takes part either in timetabled lessons or in the weekly programming club – which also acts as a drop-in support session for GCSE students. We also run a Digital Leader scheme and attend a GDST conference each year.