The Computing at School Working Group is an informal group that aims to promote the teaching of computing at school. Our membership is broad, and includes teachers, examiners, parents, university faculty, and employers.

CAS was born out of our excitement with our discipline, combined with a serious concern that our brightest students are being turned off computing by a combination of factors that have conspired to make the subject seem dull and pedestrian. Our goal is to put the fun back into computing at school.

We see computing as a rich and deep discipline in its own right, like physics or mathematics. Like those subjects, computing explores foundational principles and ideas, rather than training students in skills related to particular artefacts.

Our focus is Computing rather than ICT. Computing focuses on how computers work and how to program them, whereas ICT is focused on how to use computers. Both are useful, but they are not the same, and ICT is already well served by other organisations such as NAACE. Our focus is on UK schools, not on universities or employers, although of course both of the latter are keenly interested in what goes on at school. We seek partnership with other organisations with overlapping objectives (such as eSkills, NAACE, STEMNet, TDA, BECTA), professional societies (such as BCS, IET), and projects (such as cs4fn, CSInside, and Greenfoot).

We seek to work at many levels, including:

1. Directly supporting specialist ICT/Computing teachers who are excited by computing, by providing them with teaching material, training, local hubs, and the opportunity to meet with like-minded colleagues.
2. Launch a Computer Science Teachers Association for the UK.
3. Working at a institutional level, for example by encouraging the developments of a GCSE in Computing.