BT has agreed to support the project from March until the end of this school year. The project was originally funded by the Department for Education to from Sept 2014 to March 2015.
 

Led by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in partnership with BT, and initially funded by the Department for Education – the Barefoot project supports primary school teachers to teach the new computing curriculum which became compulsory in schools throughout England last September.
The scheme provides cross-curricular computer science resources and training for primary school teachers with no previous computer science knowledge. The initiative is being supported through a programme of free in-school computing workshops for primary school teachers across England.
 

Pat Hughes, Project Leader for Barefoot Computing said: “The announcement that BT is providing funding to extend the Barefoot project is great news. The scheme has proved to be popular so far. As well as training thousands of teachers there have been 6000 registrations to the Barefoot website with 2500 new teacher registrations in the last two months. Barefoot helps teachers understand ideas and concepts such as algorithms, abstraction and data structures, how they occur naturally in many other disciplines that they also teach, and how they can teach them to children starting from age 5.”
 

The Barefoot training workshops are run by volunteer professionals from the IT/computing and education sectors, these events introduce the new computing curriculum to teachers and explain the support available to them through Barefoot and other related projects.
Pat Hughes continued: “This programme of events will help equip teachers with the skills and knowledge needed to incorporate the computer science elements of the new computing curriculum into their lessons. By providing high quality cross-curricular computer science resources for primary school teachers, supported by explanations of the key computing concepts, we are providing support for teachers who may have little previous knowledge of computer science. A lot of teachers are already introducing many of these concepts in to their classrooms without realising it and we want them to see that it’s not as complicated as they may think.”