Is there a skills gap in the UK?

I recently gave a talk at the Westminster e-Forum on behalf of Naace. Here is the text of that presentation, which had to last no longer than four minutes. The audience was composed of Members of Parliament, journalists, and high-ranking representatives of skills organisations, companies and educational bodies.

The sub-text of the brief I was given was, no doubt, that schools should be doing more to encourage young people to take up careers in the IT industry (possibly via a university computer programming course of some description).

I have issues about that. For example, is it schools' job to do what the IT industry itself seems to find difficult to do, ie make IT-related jobs seem exciting and non-"nerdy" (especially to girls)? As often is the case, schools were taken to task by some of the speakers for the fact that ICT lessons are boring -- as proven by the fact that one of the speaker's daughter says so.

Actually, many ICT lessons are boring, but I like to feel that my own evidence for saying that (inspections, school visits, and general reading and discussion) is rather more robust. As I said in a comment from the floor at the end of one of the sessions, the phenomenon is well-established enough for me to feel moved to write a book about it (see the article about that).

More importantly, any subject can be taught in a boring way. The challenge is to identify good practice and then find ways of disseminating it.

But there is another issue. According to the Leitch Report,

"Today, over 70 per cent of our 2020 workforce have already completed their compulsory education."

That being the case, isn't it a bit late to be focusing on schools?

Anyway, read on to find out what I actually said, which had to take no longer than 4 minutes. I did it too :-)

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