Computer Education in Schools

New: 15th December: Colin Monson interview (from June 2024)

The Computer Education Group of the British Computer Society met for the first time on December 20th 1965. Their aim was to connect the schools and colleges that were already doing things with computers and to further spread the use of computers in education. 

The Hoskyns Group, a UK IT and professional services business, took on the project called 'CES': Computing Education in Schools.

International Computers Limited (ICL) itself was formed when International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), English Electric Computers (EEC) and Elliott Automation merged in 1968.

Hoskyns worked on it until 1969, when the project was bought by International Computers Limited (ICL), and ICL-CES was born.

The first ICL-CES newsletter of October 1969 (original copy in the University of Manchester ICL archive) reports on the takeover:

The first CES materials (16+) were developed by Hoskyns, and as written above, were used for teaching during the school year 1968-69.

One of ICL-CES's early books, 'Fundamentals of Computing' (what would be later be known under ICL-CES as part of their 16+ program) is actually marked on each page (c) Hoskyns Group Ltd 1969.  See this page for details of that book.

The CES project remained part of ICL from 15th September 1969 until October 1983, when it was sold  for under £100k to Acorn and renamed Acorn CES (Computing Educational Services). You can read my thoughts about the end of ICL-CES here.

In a way, ICL-CES was a project similar to the work that that organisations such as the Raspberry Pi foundation carry out today. Providing support to teachers by creating resources, training and educating teachers, and producing materials for pupils to further their knowledge and maybe pass some exams. Back then it was Computer Studies CSE, O level and Computer Science A level. These days it's GCSEs and A' level.

ICL-CES provided student textbooks, teacher resources, newsletters, organised meetings and more. Naturally, throughout all of this there was a link to ICL's computer hardware that were resident across the country in businesses, polytechnics, sixth forms and universities.

It was all a bit before my time, as I was poring over computing textbooks during the 1990s. It must have been so exciting to work on the project and be involved in shaping computing education during the 60s & 70s.  This site serves to inform and document my research around CES, early computing education, the resources that were produced and how computing education changed over the life of the project.

Your first point of call for any information about ICL-CES should be the excellent https://iclces.uk/  website. The author was a student using the ICL-CES resources and there is a fantastic amount of information, ephemera and more. Highly recommended.

This site doesn't aim to mimic or duplicate, it aims to provide additional information, detail and insight that hopefully complements the above site.

If you have any ephemera related to the CES project (newsletters, teacher packs, course leader bulletins etc), please get in touch via the email at the very bottom or the social links.