There is no such thing as “UK education”, only English and Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish. The latter is significantly different from the others, and programming is a core part of our curriculum for excellence Technologies strand, from age 3 through to 18.
It’s why my daughter learns input-process-output at nursery school (kindergarten) through computer programmes and robots. It’s why the literary structure and coding expertise needed to create a computer game is taught in more and more primary (elementary) schools. It’s the reason that the very “learn how to use, not how to make it” approach to software has been questioned for the last eight years or more in Scottish computer science circles, and moves are made to reinstate the importance of programming at secondary (high school) level.
It’s why our definition of ‘text’ in the Literacy (arts) guidance moves well beyond “the three Rs” and includes the likes of text messaging, computer games and the web at large.