How many hours, in which grade

Before a school can timetable this subject it needs two numbers per grade band: how many hours, and what counts as evidence at the end of them.

The hours

The framework does not hedge the first figure. §2.1 states it flatly: "Time allocation: 50 hours annually." It is fifty, not about fifty.

What counts as evidence

This is where the mandate diverges most sharply from how schools usually think about a subject, and where most of the confusion sits. There are two entirely different regimes.

Grades 3 to 8: no marks

Progress is recorded as skill levels against the six computational-thinking skills, aligned to PARAKH, together with a portfolio of the child's work. There is no board mark and no examination. What a school has to be able to show is that the hours were taught and that each child's skill levels were tracked.

That is a different administrative job from running an exam. A mark is produced once; a portfolio and a skill record accumulate across a year, and they cannot be reconstructed in March from memory.

What this means for planning a year

Fifty hours across roughly forty teaching weeks is a little over an hour a week, small enough to be squeezed out by everything else, and large enough that losing it is visible by February. A hundred hours is closer to three periods a week and cannot be absorbed into other lessons without a plan.

• Lay the hours across the calendar before term starts, not after the first month has gone.
• Decide which subject carries CT in each grade, so the hours have an owner.
• Record hours as they are taught. Reconstructing them later is guesswork, and for Grades 3–8 the record is the assessment.
• Keep the portfolio building through the year rather than assembling it at the end.