In the last decade, there has been an increasing global interest at a policy level in the benefits of providing computing as a school subject. Many of the arguments centre around global equity in an increasingly technological society.
The Computing Around The World (CATW) study aimed to provide a snapshot of the evolving state of K-12 computing education around the world in 2024.
This work develops research begun by the Brookings Institution report (Vegas et al. 2021) and data [personal communication], which identified that in 2019, for 146 countries across the world, there was no available online evidence of computer science education provision, either at primary, middle and/or secondary level, on a mandatory, optional or cross-curricular basis; neither was there any government announced planned expansion or pilot activity.
With a renewed focus on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4, Quality education (UN 2015), arising from its 2030 deadline, many jurisdictions are reviewing their curricula, paying increased attention to localisation, gender equity and ‘21st Century skills’, including computing and digital literacy.
Given that the subject area of computing (the term we use to refer to Computer Science) is continually evolving, we wanted to investigate if there had been any changes in intended computing education provision since 2019, with a focus on where and why computing is being introduced into the curriculum globally.
Our primary research question was: In terms of country policy and intentional activity, how has global computing education changed in the period 2019-2024?
We took as our starting point spreadsheet data for 2019, from the Brookings Institution [personal communication]. This data recorded global evidence of intended Computer Science education provision in the following categories: mandatory or optional at primary, middle and/or secondary level, announced in plans or pilot projects, or integrated across the curriculum.
An online search of documents relating to countries’ intended computing curricula was conducted between March and June 2024 for all countries for which there was no evidence of CSEd provision in the Brookings data. A total of 188 sources of information was identified as potentially relevant.
Following our research, the map below indicates the dominant mode of provision of computing education of countries in 2024. No evidence of computing education nor any planned expansion or pilot activity, could be found online for the countries coloured grey.
As a work in progress the project is only in the preliminary stages of analysis. The descriptive statistics below relate to the four continents Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe.
Globally
In 2019, for 146 out of 220 (66%) countries there was no available online evidence of K-12 Computer Science education (CSEd) provision. Between 2019 and 2024, half 73 (50%) of those countries had announced some change in their intended CS curriculum offer. Of these, the majority have announced a plan or pilot for expansion (29%), offer CS courses on a school-to-school basis (17%) or have made the subject mandatory or optional starting in secondary school (10%).
By continent
In terms of intentional activity, computing in the curriculum has increased across all continents over the past 5 years. In that time the percentage of countries in the four continents of interest offering some form of computing education in K-12 has increased by:
| Continent | % countries offering CS 2019 | % countries offering CS 2024 | % increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 9.40 | 49.05 | 39.65 |
| Asia | 24.50 | 57.89 | 33.39 |
| Europe | 63.49 | 88.88 | 25.39 |
| LAC | 29.54 | 70.45 | 40.91 |
The percentage of African and Asian countries with computing in their intended curriculum is still lower than European and Latin American countries, however, the gap has narrowed over the last five years.
Overall, provision has almost doubled between 2019 and 2024—an encouraging development.
In 2019 an ITICSE Working Group (including RPCERC), collaborated to pilot the METRECC instrument – an international benchmark study of K-12 CSEd in schools. This instrument was further tested in the following outputs: