The draft new Computer Science GCSE is due to be submitted for approval to Ofqual next week, with the intention of rolling out the course to secondary schools in the UK in September 2016.
One distinctive feature of the new GCSE is a focus on cyber security, including security best practices, phishing, malware, firewalls and people as the ‘weak point’ insecure system, which learners will study for the first time at this level, as well as the ethical and legal concerns around computer science technologies.
Since last September, computing has been a compulsory part of the curriculum, with a move away from using computer applications to learning how to create them. Central to the new GCSE is a greater emphasis on ‘computational thinking’, which represents 60% of the content.
You can read the press release here