In April 2025 the coalition Informatics for All released a report on the requirements for the informatics school curriculum and informatics school teachers’ education. Following a survey conducted by the Informatics For All Steering Committee throughout Europe aiming at creating common European guidelines for teaching informatics in school and educate students, the report focuses on analysing the Informatics Reference Framework for School (IRFS) framework (2022) and its effectiveness as a guideline for informatics school curriculum designers.
The framework, composed of 11 core topic areas, was the result of the collaboration of national informatics communities from 14 European countries and has been translated into various languages. Additionally, 10 contemporary informatics themes such as data science, programming languages and artificial intelligence/robotics were taken into consideration and were discussed in the subsequent Informatics for All coalition’s document Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School, released in January 2023.
Later, in November 2023, the Council of the European Union approved the “European Recommendation on Informatics Education at School”, which affirms that all Member States should be encouraging high quality learning and teaching of informatics from primary education.
Therefore, the Informatics for All coalition decided to create a questionnaire and shared it with 36 countries’s educators and experts to identify similarities in the way informatics is taught in schools, in order to gather an objective nationally shared perspective. 28 countries provided their answers by June 2024.
Experts and educators from all the countries involved stated the importance of having 1-2 hours per week of informatics in primary education and 1-3 in secondary education. Moreover, it has been remarked that, among the core topic areas, data and information, algorithms and programming should receive 10-20% of instructional time each, whilst the remaining 8 topics should receive 5-10%.
Furthermore, there was a general agreement on the number of credits to achieve for pre-service teachers in primary and lower secondary schools, respectively 15-60 ECTS and 30-120 ECTS. These credits comprehend Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and Content Knowledge in general and exclude general pedagogy and practical work. It was highlighted that PCK should center on educating teachers in all the subjects, informatics included, broaden their pedagogical methods, and that it should empower students to develop further skills.
Lastly, with the rise of AI tools, ethics was also mentioned as one of the complementary aspects to consider in teaching informatics that would require more preparation from the national education systems.
On this last note, the Digital First project aims at moving from a traditional approach in informatics education based on programming languages and technical knowledge to an innovative pedagogical approach focusing on how to help students learn how to address real-life challenges. This shift in education will encourage the younger generations to be “active creators” of the digital world, rather than “passive consumers”.
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You can check the full report here: https://www.informaticsforall.org/a-european-survey-on-requirements-for-the-informatics-school-curriculum-and-informatics-school-teachers-education/
