Industry and education

This is an interesting post for me.  The reason why is because for me, the starting point for this renaissance of computing in schools that I'm interested in, came from an industry need.  Actually, that isn't strictly true as it would dismiss the work of people such as Computing at School, whose work is nothing short of stellar, and precedes the two milestones I am going to mention now, but let me digress for a moment and explain. Those milestones I speak of were the Gove BETT speech of 2012, and the Hope and Livingstone Next Gen report, which arguably informed Gove (along with Eric Schmidt).  Those two events changed the teaching of ICT in schools in the UK, the latter directly.  The change was to remove the old ICT curriculum that focussed on using software, and introduce one that had the creation, and the understanding of the creation, of software at its forefront.  The Next Gen report makes a big point that the reason we need to teach things like coding, is because industry can't employ enough young, talented, qualified graduates with these digital creation skills.  Now, this is an interesting one as the old ICT curriculum did teach and assess digital creation, but this wasn't explicitly coding or programming.  Also, when I studied for my undergraduate degree, we did learn programming (albeit Visual Basic) and animation (albeit Flash (anyone remember that?)) but it was probably miles behind what industry were doing.  My University at the time, Anglia Ruskin also had a successful game creation degree, so why can't industry employ these graduates?  I guess what we've all come to agree though is that doing this stuff at Uni is too little, too late.  So it's great that we are doing this in schools again, and thank you Michael and Ian.

The point of this post then?  Well, I have been to a number of employer symposiums and the like via my networks at Essex County Council (who support my research in this area; thank you ECC, sorry I don't pay council tax as a student).  Lots of these employers hop up and down and say they can't recruit graduates as they aren't qualified enough or can't function in business due to this irrelevant education (their words, not mine, and I have plenty of soundbites to back this up!) so from an industry perspective it seems that all would fit with the conclusions in Next Gen.  Yet, I hear different things from Universities who think they give their students a well-rounded and high quality education, which by its nature has to be more generic than the employers would ideally want.  Then I hear from students who say that there aren't the jobs out there to apply for, and if they do apply, they get knocked back.  McDonalds and the Apple Store never knock them back though and I hate that some of my previous students are still in McJobs, and are very very capable.

So... My plan is to embed myself into a large local engineering and technology firm and ask the folks there (the old hands and the graduate trainees especially) what gives?  I need to find out what industry wants, what industry can do to align itself with schools and universities in terms of STEM, and try and answer something that appears not to add up in my head.  I will try and use the full armoury of social science research tools to try and find out more.  After all, I am now connected in schools, government and industry in the area, and will need to leverage these links to reality check my creation of an artefact and associated practice for schools, children and parents to use.