Education Secretary Michael Gove has apparently come over all gooey and romantic by plugging a new app called Love Book that was created by one of his wife's close friends. The Tory MP is urging teenagers to stop the practice of sending naughty messages to each other – the phenomenon known as sexting – and urged them to exchange …

Comment Over in Blighty, there’s an outbreak of sanity that puts at risk years of work by the computer industry to place itself at the centre of the education budget. If stories coming from the UK are accurate, the government has discovered that the IT sector’s vision for computers in schools amount to little more than an industry-wide …

Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and BT have been signed up by the Education Secretary Michael Gove - who thinks Tim Berners Lee is the "creator of the internet" - to offer industry insights into the type of computer science skills British school kids need to be equipped with for the workplace. A £20,000 scholarship was also announced …

Education Secretary Michael Gove today proposed killing off Blighty's ICT curriculum in September to give it a thorough reboot. Launching a consultation into his plans, Gove suggested that from the start of the next academic year, schools should be able to teach what they want in computer classes. The Tory minister recommended …

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has urged British MPs to learn how to code - in what could arguably be seen as his most ambitious call to action yet. Speaking at The Guardian's Every Second Counts Forum he said coding skills would equip MPs with the ability to legislate more effectively on technology. “ …

The UK government is planning to use a network of 400 "master teachers" of computer science to train up other teachers and deliver a new tech curriculum in English schools. The sensei will be "right at the top of their computer science game", the education secretary Michael Gove said in a speech at the Bett Learning Technology …

Comment "There is no question of HMRC selling data." That's the promise from Whitehall, which is floating the idea of "sharing" sensitive taxpayer information with private businesses. It's the latest in a series of attempts from the Tory-led coalition to turn public and not-so-public data into a moneyspinner for UK PLC. A period of …

At the end of 2012, Education Secretary Michael Gove told Parliament that he wanted "to share extracts of data held in the National Pupil Database for a wider range of purposes than possible in order to maximise the value of this rich dataset". Ultimately, the government wants the private sector to tout "tools and services which …

QuotW This was the week that Karsten Nohl, the security researcher who found a way to hack into SIM cards with a single text, told El Reg that he was upset that the mobile industry seemed so unconcerned about the vulnerabilities he had reported. He told El Reg: We thought our story was one of white-hat hacking preventing criminal …

Education Minister Michael Gove has added computer science into the new English Baccalaureate as a "fourth science", putting it on a par with Physics, Biology and Chemistry, the Department of Education announced today. Computer Science is the only extra subject to make it onto the list of core academic subjects that comprise the …

The Department for Education claims a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft will save schools £10m on licensing over the next three years, in part by "factoring freeware" into the deal. The agreement began 1 January and runs until the end of 2015 giving schools across the UK the option to buy Microsoft …

British children will be taught more about the solar system and evolution in an overhaul of the primary school curriculum proposed yesterday by Education Secretary Michael Gove. Gove reckons his new draft lesson plan will "restore rigour" to classrooms by bumping up the amount of stuff kids have to learn: in science that will …

Comment The BBC now has a policy of attaching an educational theme to each year that will be rammed into as many programmes as possible and will run across all of its channels and websites. 2014 was the centenary of WWI, as anyone with functioning sensory organs knows, and Auntie Beeb has decreed that in 2015, we will learn to code, …

The man dubbed a "superhead" in charge of five London schools has resigned months after being suspended as Hackney Council continues to probe the distribution of tech contracts. This comes after Hackney Learning Trust voiced "concerns" about the computer contracts in the schools as well as Best Start Schools federation chief …

Comment British red-top The Sun is running a campaign to “Get Kids Coding” in collaboration with Google that demonstrates failures of judgment and technology that have reduced my family as well as some Reg staff to helpless laughter. The tabloid is, of course, a contentious choice for promoting any academic activity - teachers mostly …

Analysis The Tories were big fans - in opposition - of labelling the then-Labour government a "database state" as it lumbered from one ID card disaster to another. But now that the Conservative Party is heading towards the mid-term point of its coalition with the Lib Dems, the notion of hoarding ever-more information about British …

Exclusive The Department for Education broke the Data Protection Act after it exposed the email addresses, unencrypted passwords and sensitive answers of members of the public who filled in an online form about parental controls on the net, The Register can reveal. However - despite the breach - the Information Commissioner's Office has …

Education Secretary Michael Gove was under fire this morning after it was revealed that his department used private email systems for official business that – it is claimed – included sensitive information. Officials at the Information Commissioner's Office have written to the Department for Education (DfE) asking for more …

Schoolteachers should warn British children as young as five about the "dangers" of finding pornography online, say families. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) asked parents to suggest what schools should be doing to protect kids from smutty websites: nearly half (42 per cent) of 1,009 respondents believed …

An irate headteacher reported one of his pupils to the police and tried to scupper the youngster's chances of getting into university after reading a blog post that slammed his school. Jacques Szemalikowski, headmaster of Hampstead School in North London, refused to allow 19-year-old Kinnan Zaloom to come and collect his A-level …

Comment A Sony-owned factory in South Wales has now punched out more than a million Raspberry Pi board computers. This is laudable, but it shouldn’t be taken as a sign that Britain is going to ride to economic recovery on the back of a new generation of young programmers. The Raspberry Pi is a fortysomething’s wet dream of early 1980s …

Video Education Secretary Michael Gove faces many obstacles (and many opponents) to his plan to let parents, charities and educational experts open and manage new Free Schools in their local areas. There are many hurdles for Free School advocates to overcome too - funding, for example. But even before you get to that stage, how do …

The UK government denied today that it was dropping IT entirely from the national curriculum while adding that tech contracts would be more bite-sized and flexible at some point soon. Back in January Education Secretary Michael Gove said he was axing the current ICT classes and getting folks together for one of those well-loved …

The government's decision to dump England's school building programme has been overthrown in the High Court, with a judge describing education Secretary Michael Gove's plans as "unlawful". Mr Justice Holman said today that the coalition's actions to end the scheme in July 2010 were "an abuse of power", reported the BBC. The …

Does the use of Gmail or Hotmail by a Minister's Private Office (in order to evade Freedom of Information (FOI) obligations) also lead to breaches in the Data Protection Act? Well, I can see how this could be the case. The press has raised this issue only in the context of FOI. Yesterday's Sunday Times, for example, noted that …

Prime Minister David Cameron has dismissed as "nonsense" claims that suggest a "nod and wink" arrangement had been struck between his Conservative Party and Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper business News International. The PM, speaking at the Leveson Inquiry into the relationships between politicians and media owners, added …

The standard of technology provision in schools varies widely, despite spending of £487m on ICT equipment and services last year, according to the findings of independent review commissioned by the education secretary Michael Gove. Sebastian James, group operations director at Dixons Retail, was commissioned to lead the review …

¡Bong! ”The period of schooling should be shortened, education should be revolutionized, and the domination of our schools by bourgeois intellectuals should by no means be allowed to continue.” - Mao Tse-Tsung, "The Whole Country Should Become a Great School of Mao Tse-Tung's Thought", Editorial, Renmin Ribao August 1966 It is rare and …

Analysis A 10-week public consultation on blocking online pornography to "protect" children browsing the web ends today. And unsurprisingly many of those for and against such a plan have been lobbying hard as the deadline for opinions on the matter closes. The government wants UK internet service providers to install filters that, by …

Everything Everywhere switched on another 4G trial network yesterday, proving that it has the radio spectrum and the political support to deploy the high-speed mobile broadband standard in Blighty - if only the pesky regulator would let it. The Cumbrian network was switched on by Education Secretary Michael Gove with local MP …

Stob 'In his speech [...] the Education Secretary Michael Gove appeared to accept in its entirety the argument that ICT had become little more than training in office skills and something far more rigorous was required [...] While Alex Hope's slogan "coding is the new Latin" did not appeal to some, it must have appealed to the …

Comment If you see puffs of black smoke drifting over Whitehall this week - don't be alarmed. The Information Commission is expected to rule that "backchannels" such as private email accounts, and other information recorded by Ministers and public servants must be revealed to the public. The ruling to expand the media available for …

2012 review Earlier this year your correspondent was standing tantalisingly close to Matt Smith in the ACTUAL TARDIS - long story, not gonna Facebook it, never gonna tweet it. However, many Brits are happy to noisily ricochet chunks of their private lives across any number of websites and systems, in a year in which the British government …

The Tory Party will scrap the government's controversial ContactPoint child database if elected. The database, with entries for every child in England and Wales, has been repeatedly delayed and attacked by data protection groups. It was originally due to go live in April of this year, then October. It is now meant to be ready by …

Is Blighty's Freedom of Information (FOI) law working? The civil servant leading the agency charged with enforcing it thinks so, and says a review by politicians shouldn't succumb to myths about the supposed dangers of more openness by the State. UK Information Commissioner Christopher Graham has called for "careful analysis" …

An incoming Conservative government would replace the ContactPoint database of all children in England with a system covering only those seen as vulnerable. Its central system would cover only groups such as those in care, on the child protection register or with backgrounds of domestic violence, according to Tim Loughton, the …

Mobile phones would be outlawed in UK classrooms under Conservative Party plans to beef up discipline in schools. The Tories said in an education policy document that they wanted to see authority returned to teachers. They reckoned an important part of that proposal would include a crackdown on the use of mobile phones. David …

Exclusive The Conservatives have called on the government to explain why supposedly impartial civil servants have intervened in a political argument over how sensitive data on children should be stored and shared. Earlier this week the Department for Children, Schools and Families wrote to local authorities to argue that Labour's plans …

A top government official has apologised after civil servants working on the ContactPoint project wrote a memo to local authorities that was sharply critical of Tory policy on child data sharing. In a letter to shadow secretary of state for children, schools and families Michael Gove, David Bell wrote: "The individuals concerned …

The rise of Weblogging has been a cold shower for the complacent mass communication industries. Although the Weblogging pioneers are due much praise, their own rhetoric deserves examination, and they could also raise their sights higher. Nico Macdonald reports, and concludes with a radical proposal for the future of Weblogging …