We've been told to start teaching the sixth-formers computing. That sounds a bit mathematical, with a hint of English, so could you two get together and find something to teach them?
That was pretty much how it was in my day, though not as organised as that. The Maths teacher ended up responsible but knew nothing. It was "there's an ASR33 in the cubby-hole, have at it". And then we discovered we could use the card punch machines at the local uni.
There was definitely a more structured approach by the time the BBC Micro emerged, but it still seems to me it was mostly kids doing it for themselves in the heyday of Home Computers, led not by teachers but magazines.
And then Home Computers faded away and it seems GW-BASIC wasn't so attractive, though plenty jumped into Visual Basic to create no end of monstrosities but that soon shifted to producing Geocities monstrosities, and then kids found that playing games and surfing was more fun, and then came consoles, then Social Media.
The whole notion that anything killed off kid's interest in coding other than it just going out of fashion with kids favouring other things is just fantasy to me.
By the time we had "Computing" properly on the school curriculum it wasn't coding. Because that had pretty much disappeared, It was how to use, not how to create, because that's what it was thought students should learn, because it's what they'd need at work.
It was D&T where the coders and proto-Makers were. Then Making became a thing, rekindled coding and electronics. Arduino played a big part in that and then the Pi came along.
Or we can imagine there was a thriving coding scene deliberately suffocated by Microsoft and Windows and only resuscitated by the Raspberry Pi. M$ and Windoze evil, Linux good.
