It also said schools have cut back on the hours spent teaching the
subject.
In 2018, 130,000 students got a GCSE in either computer science or ICT
(information and communications technology), down from 140,000 the previous
year.
This year, the ICT exam is not an option.
The fall in exam passes follows the phasing out of the ICT GCSE from the
national curriculum in England and its replacement by the more challenging
computer science.
However, with entries for computer science growing only slowly it looks
certain that far fewer 16-year-olds will emerge with any computing
qualification.
The study says the provision of computing education is "in steep
decline", with the number of hours of computing taught in English
secondary school classrooms falling by 31% between 2012 and 2017.
The report's authors say that for the majority of school students who do
not opt to take the computer science GCSE it now looks unlikely that they will
be getting any computing education in schools beyond the age of 14.
'Disenfranchised'
"It looks likely that hundreds of thousands of students,
particularly girls and poorer students, will be disenfranchised from a digital
education over the next few years," said Peter Kemp, senior lecturer in
computing education at the University of Roehampton.
Sixty-one per cent of schools offered the computer science GCSE as an
option in 2018, a modest rise on the previous year.
But a number of schools where it had previously been an option dropped
it last year, among them a number of girls-only comprehensives and grammar
schools.
Another of the report's authors, Miles Berry, says the new GCSE has got
a reputation for being harder than other subjects, and that has proved
off-putting to less academic students.
"Even among the academically strong, privileged intake, performance
is typically below that of students' other subjects, and thus students, their
parents and their head teachers might understandably take the view that this is
not an easy way to get top grades," he said.
The old ICT course got a bad reputation for giving children few skills
apart from how to set up a spreadsheet or make a Microsoft PowerPoint
presentation.
Universities complained that students were applying to study computing
having not even learned basic programming at school.
The spread of code clubs, the birth of the Raspberry Pi project and the
new computer science exam were all sparked by anxiety about the level of
computing education in schools.
The Department for Education said the government had acknowledged the
importance of computing by making it a compulsory part of the national
curriculum.
"We are investing £84m over the next four years to up-skill up to
8,000 computer science teachers and drive up participation in computer
science," said a spokesperson.
Source: BBC
