Your child will be expected to show more sophisticated ICT skills at this stage in the curriculum. Learning involves developing more in-depth responses to a variety of different types of ICT equipment. Your child will also be taught to understand how ICT devices with sensors can be used to monitor and measure external events.

By the end of this Key Stage, some children will be able to refine their work by the way it is presented to different audiences or by purposefully manipulating rules when working with control systems to produce alternative outcomes. They should also be able to recognise areas for improvement in their work.

Lesson examples

Here are the kinds of things your child might learn at school:

• A group of year 7 pupils are introduced to the school intranet and asked to create guidelines for using the system. The guidelines could take the form of a desktop-published handbook or a multimedia presentation. The class learns how to log on to the network, launch applications, access shared files and save work into their own area.
   
• Year 8 children undertake a project to revamp the way a holiday company manages its bookings and customers. They design a corporate image and ways to automate the booking system to increase efficiency and then present their ideas to the fictional company.
   
• Year 9 pupils work on a long-term project to develop and implement an ICT system for a fictional business. The pupils learn to use relational databases, mail merge in the design of the system, and to plan the project using milestones and deadlines.

Help your child at home

• If you can, try to provide opportunities for your child to use a wider range of information communication technology, such as keyboards, remote control devices, recording equipment or even doing the shopping for you on the internet - although you may want to enter your card details yourself!
   
• Encourage your child to make the most of the computer to improve the presentation of homework by using text, graphs, pictures, sound or video and so forth. Remember you can use the computer at the local library if you don’t have one at home.
   
• Researching up-to-date information from secondary sources like the internet or a multimedia encyclopaedia can make a difference to marks. However, remember to talk to your child about dangers of copying work.