The number of girls in England studying for a GCSE in computing has more than halved in less than a decade, prompting warnings about the "dominance of men in shaping the modern world". The sharp decline in female participation follows government qualification changes that led to the scrapping of the old information communication technology (ICT) GCSE and its replacement with a new computer science GCSE. While the government's reforms were aimed at creating "more academically challenging and knowledge-based" qualifications, the introduction of the new syllabus has had the unintended consequence of driving female entries down, according to new research by King's College London. In 2015 43% of candidates for ICT GCSE were female, compared with just 21% of those who took GCSE computer science in 2023. In numerical terms, 40,000 female students took ICT GCSE in 2015, with a further 5,000 taking computer science.

Elite independent schools are currently in talks with a technology company exploring a new artificial intelligence programme that could replace GCSEs. Yet while a digital alternative to the GCSE that some schools view as "increasingly dry" might sound promising, how feasible would it really be? Mike Buchanan, executive director of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, has spoken of how this could create a far more "personalised" style of learning, with computer programmes constructing a digitised profile of each pupil's skills. And arguably, the historic reason for GCSEs no longer exists, given that most students do not leave school at 16. So the idea of a bespoke digital learning platform is attractive, and according to one source in the private school sector, senior figures at Ofsted are interested. Rather than studying a raft of GCSEs, pupils would learn from an online programme alongside their usual class teaching.

GCSEs should be scrapped and A-levels should be replaced by a mix of academic and vocational subjects, says Robert Halfon, chairman of the Education Select Committee. His radical rewriting of England's exam system is designed to give young people a much broader range of skills for their working lives. The former Tory minister says GCSEs for 16-year-olds have become "pointless". The Department for Education defended GCSEs as "gold standard" exams. But head teachers' leader Geoff Barton said the ideas had a "lot of merit".

A top neuroscientist has called for parents to be more sympathetic towards the grouchy behaviour of teenagers as it is all part of their brains changing and maturing. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, said science is only just starting to understand how a significant loss of grey matter affects teenage behaviour. She includes typical characteristics like moodiness, risk-taking, sleeping late and feelings of embarrassment towards their parents in the list of things that should be understood in the context of the maturing teenage brain. 'The teenage brain is not broken, it is not dysfunctional, it is not a defective adult brain,' she told an audience at the Hay festival, having recently published a book on the subject: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain. A top neuroscientist has called for parents to be more sympathetic to teenagers' bad habits She told the audience that the teenage brain loses 17 per cent of its grey matter between childhood and adulthood in the pre-frontal cortex, the brain's'control center'. The impact of this is something that scientists are only recently beginning to understand, she said.