I went to a conference last week and one of the main speeches was quite terrifying - its title was "Why we don't need teachers".

You may think that is old hat. I have sat through a lot about education and technology myself – but this was something else.

The speaker ran through a number of startling advances in technology starting with various military and law enforcement possibilities, hammering home a statistic that computers are doubling their power every 18 months. When this is translated into the lives of the children starting school today, the twist on the LP Hartley quotation “the future is a foreign country; they do things differently there” rings very true.

The theme of the talk was that 1) we oldies better get up to speed and 2) children must be taught coding because then they will be able to control computer technology rather than it control them, visualising an apartheid world for us with power and privilege lying in the hands of the coding elite.

Coding was taught and was highly fashionable around the 70s when people were just starting to get to grips with computer technology but has since been restricted to those doing maths degrees and not all of them either. Now it is coming back into its own and the basic ideas are being introduced to younger and younger children.

Only there is a problem of finding the teachers. Like anything vaguely mathematical, teachers who are not trained mathematicians are extremely wary of it. So a challenge for the future is giving teachers the confidence and knowledge to introduce children to coding’s basics.

Another simple problem this raises is examinations. Exams are still based on a lot of rote learning, however much everyone likes to talk about higher order thinking skills. Why put all that emphasis on fast recall when the vocabulary, the formulae, the equations are all there at the press of a button?

Again, why are we making children hand write examinations? A few can get special consideration and the exam boards keep telling us that they will review this, but all these young people who hardly ever write two words in the normal course of things, end up scrawling their exam scripts – and who knows if their pen is one of those that memorises answers and can write it out with the right tap?

* Sarah Evans, Principal, King Edward VI High School for Girls