IT sector must help schools

Much of the recent debate about the quality of ICT education in our schools certainly resonates with my experience in the mid-1990s (ICT lessons are boring and trivial) .

Raised on Sensible Soccer and Street Fighter 2 and discovering the internet, I signed on for IT GCSE in 1997 to be confronted with a curriculum of basic computer literacy I already had. This wasn’t at all what I was looking for in an IT education and I transferred to pottery, and was lost to software for more than a decade.

Thankfully, in Sunderland Software City’s work inspiring the next generation of software workers in the North East, we’ve seen firsthand how much the situation has improved in recent years and been fortunate enough to witness much first-rate teaching in local schools and colleges.

This doesn’t change the fact that the onus remains on our industry and organisations such as ourselves to work with education providers to offer our expertise and experience to ensure their curricula not only meets the needs of the growing local software industry, but also inspires enough young people to consider a career in it – a situation bound to become ever-more pressing as young people become more and more software-aware at a younger and younger age.

John Hart, Sunderland Software City