My Experience
Years 4-7: Used Textease. This was basically MS Office but all "child friendsly" as if we had never used MS Office at home. The only programming was 'Textease Turtle' which was LOGO created entirely through using a GUI to say forwards, backwards.
Year 8: Started using MS Office. Some people couldn't cope with the change. Consisted entirely of Word and Excel IIRC
Year 9-11: Did an 'Applied' GCSE course (The only one offered, which everyone had to do). Simple database, word, excel. created many many templates "memo" "fax header" "meeting minutes" etc. The written part of the exam was covered in the last half term. Consisted of questions such as "You want to connect a computer to a network, what hardware do you need" A: A Network Interface Card.
Many of my year ended up not coping with this course and never took the exam and hence did not get a GCSE in ICT. Why didn't they cope? I suspect they found it far too boring.
6th Form: Everyone at 6th form ahd to take the ECDL course which had questions even more insane that the GCSE questions - such as "If the mouse is not moving what is the problem? a) The mouse, b) The monitor c) The harddrive. The Computing A-Level I did was interesting. Programming in Pascal / Delphi for the first year coursework (a set program specification). And then using Access + VBA for the second year coursework (free-choice). Our teacher told us we had to use Access, although that was not required in the qualification specification. Interestingly many dropped out after the first few months of the first year - because they didn't realise that Computing involved programming. The college also offered a ICT course - which was described to us as computing without the programming. All of the department's budget went on a trip abroad to a theme-park abroad for the BTEC group.
I know for a fact that both the A Level and GCSE spec have changed since I took it, and both teachers agree it is now far worse than when I took it. The A-Level 1st Year coursework is now programmed in a brand new language created for the course, in front of a computer where you have access only to the website where you code it, whilst not being allowed access to any other website.
I'm now doing Computer Science at a top-10 university and can say that it has one of the highest drop-out rates, again because people don't realise what the course is.