While early adopters like Israel started providing computer science programmes at high schools in 1995, dozens of countries began to put coding in the curriculum in recent years.
In the U.K., under its “computing” curriculum introduced in September 2014, children as young as five learn to create and debug simple programmes. At 11, they start learning at least two programming languages.
In Korea, starting in 2018, computer classes at middle schools, which are now elective, will become required classes to be taken once a week. Compared to the current classes, the curriculum will beef up programming content. Students will take exams for the classes, like they do for Korean, English and math classes, mainly practical tests.
At elementary schools, fifth and sixth graders will have 17 hours of software classes a year starting in 2019, while at high schools, computer classes will remain an elective subject.

But there is a dire lack of instructors with expertise in the field. While middle schools have computer class teachers, elementary schools do not. The Ministry of Education is currently figuring how many trained teachers schools would need by 2018, and are drawing up plans to recruit the required number of teachers. It said it will train 30 % of the primary school teachers ― around 60,000 ― in software education by 2018.

“We are in the process of developing teaching materials and also training teachers for elementary and middle school software classes,” a ministry official said.

Further analysis and implication for UK institutions

UK institutions are advised to take advantage to enhance exploring training partnership with local universities and institutions. The engagement of businesses in the partnership is seen to be an attractive model to increase employability. For example, there are not many teaching staff who can teach coding in schools at the moment because it will be a required course and they need at least 2 teachers in every primary and middle schools in Korea. Also, there always has been a huge demand in English education in Korea. Since UK is a leading country for both English and Computing, graduates of the same field will be wanted by many of public and private institutions of Korea.

◈Core Education and Coding Early Literacy (CECEL) is one of a growing number of private academies teaching computer programming after the government announced in July last year that software classes will become mandatory in the public education curriculum starting in 2018. “Learning coding” means acquiring computer languages which enable digital devices, websites and apps to function.

 Source: http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/phone/news/view.jsp?req_newsidx=217183