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The recent move towards more Computer Science in school in the UK has obvious implications for teacher education, both for inservice and pre-service teachers. In England and other parts of the UK we have seen an unprecedented rate of change in the way that curricula are changing from a focus on learning to use software applications to the introduction of Computer Science throughout primary and secondary schools. In this paper we describe some of the challenges that we have faced, the progress made in the integration of CS, and the support provided for teachers in their professional development. Current developments seek to support teachers with varying needs in a holistic way and we propose a transformational model of professional development [1] for CS, both for in-service teachers as well as forming the basis of new teacher training programmes.

There is concern amongst teachers about how to support all pupils in making the transition from popular graphical languages like Scratch to text-based languages like Python. In a new subject, not taught widely before at both primary and secondary education in England, there is inevitably a lack of tuned-in pedagogical expertise. In this paper, the authors address the transition process by exploring established pedagogy in Computer Science, and other subjects including Mathematics, Science and Languages, and by sharing and testing their findings with pupils and teachers in the classroom. Teaching the fundamentals of programming is well served by applying sequential solutions in both graphical and text-based languages. This practitioner action research paper focuses on scaffolding support for pupils when making the transition from graphical to text-based languages. In an approach which uses graphical languages in conjunction with, not in place of, textbased programming languages, the authors discuss ways to tackle the difficulties presented to pupils by text-based languages, and propose a tested strategy for teachers to enable pupils to undertake the transition successfully.

This paper reports on work in progress in the UK, researching models of continuing professional development (CPD) for ICT teachers needing to teach Computer Science in response to recent changes to education policy in the UK. We currently work with many teachers who either do not have an appropriate academic background to teach Computer Science, or who do and have not utilised it in the classroom due to the curriculum in place in the UK for the last fifteen years. In this paper, we outline educational policy changes in the UK that have affected teachers in ICT and Computer Science; we describe a range of models and discuss the role that local and national initiatives can play in developing a hybrid model of transformational CPD, briefly reporting on our initial findings to date.