Select Committee on Digital Skills - Report of Session 2014–15
Make or Break: The UK’s Digital Future
Appendix 5: Examples of initiatives and action
Government action on hard infrastructure (paragraph 28)
- £1 billion investment in broadband and mobile infrastructure—long-term, has a projected GVA uplift that will rise to £6.3 billion per annum by 2024 and create a net increase of 20,000 jobs by 2024.
- £780 million for Broadband Delivery UK’s Superfast Broadband Roll-Out Programme—this aims to provide over 5 million homes and businesses across the UK with superfast broadband, bringing coverage up to 95% by 2017, and to provide virtually all homes with standard broadband speeds of at least 2Mbps.
- In June 2014 the Government announced the eight successful bids for its £10 million innovation fund to explore ways to take superfast broadband to the most remote and hardest to reach places in the UK.
- The £150 million Urban Broadband Fund supports 22 Super Connected Cities to develop the digital infrastructure they needed to remain internationally competitive places to invest, visit and do business. The fund already supports wireless projects in 10 cities and has issued over 1,500 broadband connection vouchers to SMEs.
- £11.6 million investment in a world-leading 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey.
- £150 million investment in the Mobile Infrastructure Project—building infrastructure to provide mobile coverage to the remaining 0.3%–0.4% of the population who had no coverage at all. All new sites would also be capable of providing 4G services.
- Working with infrastructure providers and developers to ensure all new buildings are equipped with the infrastructure for fixed high speed broadband access.550
Government cybersecurity initiatives (paragraph 76)
Cyber Streetwise
Cyber Streetwise is a cross-Government campaign, funded by the National Cyber Security Programme, and delivered in partnership with the private and voluntary sectors. The campaign is led by the Home Office, working closely with BIS and the Cabinet Office. The campaign aims to measurably and significantly improve the online safety behaviour and confidence of consumers and SMEs.
Links to various resources produced by the campaign’s partners, helping individuals and organisations find the information they need to protect themselves, their families and their businesses, are available on its website.551
Get Safe Online
Get Safe Online is a public and private sector partnership supported by the Government and leading organisations in banking, retail, internet security and other sectors. The website aims to act as a resource providing practical advice on how to protect individuals, computers and mobile devices and businesses against fraud, identity theft, viruses and many other problems encountered online. It also contains guidance on many other related subjects—including performing backups and how to avoid theft or loss of a computer, smartphone or tablet. A wide variety of topics are included on the site—including safe online shopping, gaming and dating. The site also provides up-to-date news, tips and stories from around the world.
Get Safe Online also organises national events—such as Get Safe Online week—and works closely with law enforcement agencies and other bodies in support of their outreach activity, internal awareness and customer online safety.552
School networks delivering CPD (paragraph 113)
- The CAS network has over 14,000 members and runs over 110 free CAS Hubs across England.553 There were 300 ‘master’ teachers554 by September 2014, with 400 predicted by 2015. There is a similar scheme in Scotland funded by the Scottish Government to develop lead practitioners.555
- Teaching school alliances: “… if you e-mail [something] to a teaching school today it will be in a school tomorrow and acted upon because there is a local need and local support there”.556
- The Digital Schoolhouse initiative runs across 10 London secondary schools. It is “funded by the Mayor of London and delivered by video games trade body Ukie [Association for UK Interactive Entertainment] … with a target of over 100 schools participating in year one”.557
- Code Club runs over 2,000 volunteer-led after-school coding clubs for 9–11 year-olds, as well as a new teacher training programme.558
- Local council-university partnership: “… early 2014, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hull, responding to a significant demand from schools in the Humber region, created and delivered a small pilot programme to help address the skills gap in teachers moving from ICT to the new computing curriculum. The pilot involved 29 teachers from 17 local schools, and consisted of 2 hour weekly evening workshops in the autumn and spring terms, with the aim being to teach how to programme in Python”.559
Industry-led initiatives on careers guidance (paragraph 169)
Sky Academy
Through its Academy, Sky is working with thousands of young people to “inspire and cultivate a passion for digital careers”. For example, its Skills Studios experience allows students to use state-of-the-art technology to create their own TV reports. Sky is also developing a new careers initiative which will expose pupils to the breadth of career opportunities available at Sky.560
4Talent
4Talent is Channel 4’s nationwide outreach scheme aimed at supporting people from a range of backgrounds looking to develop a career in the media. Channel 4 also engages young people from across the UK with its digital work, holding open days where careers advice and workshops are provided by Channel 4 staff and local television and digital companies.561
City & Guilds TechBac
The TechBac is a programme of study which “blends technical qualifications with practical, real world learning developed and delivered in partnerships between education and employers”. The TechBac will provide an offer which makes digital skills integral to whatever vocational route chosen, as well as providing an option of specialising in digital industries.562
STEMNET (the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network)
STEMNET runs the UK’s only network of STEM Ambassadors, with over 27,000 volunteers. Across the UK, STEM Ambassadors volunteer to promote STEM subjects to young learners in a “vast range of original, creative, practical and engaging ways”. They are a free resource for teachers, helping to deliver the STEM curriculum and raise awareness of STEM careers, achieved by revealing how essential STEM is throughout the world. STEM Ambassadors come from a wide range of careers and professions. STEMNET ensures that the population of STEM Ambassadors reflects the diversity of the population: 40% are women; 13% describe themselves as from BAME (black and minority ethnic) backgrounds; and they range from 18 to 70 years old, with almost 60% under 35 years old.563
Private sector skills training organisations (paragraph 194)
General Assembly
“At General Assembly, we are creating a global community of individuals empowered to pursue work they love, by offering full-time immersive programs, long-form courses, and classes and workshops on the most relevant skills of the 21st century—from web development and user experience design, to business fundamentals, to data science, to product management and digital marketing.
Established in early 2011 as an innovative community in New York City for entrepreneurs and startup companies, General Assembly is an educational institution that transforms thinkers into creators through education in technology, business and design at fourteen campuses across four continents.”564
Makers Academy
Makers Academy was launched in February 2013 and is Europe’s leading coding provider. The Academy helps complete beginners to learn the basics of software development and find their first job as junior programmers in world-class companies.
Since its launch, the Academy has graduated over 250 students who went to join leading software companies as junior developers earning an average starting salaries of £30,000 per annum. Companies hiring Academy graduates include: Marks and Spencer; the Ministry of Justice; British Sky Broadcasting; Compare The Market; Deloitte Digital; Just Giving; and many other leading tech companies.
The course is full-time, face-to-face and highly intensive. Students undertake a four-week, online, part-time pre-course on the basics of programming, followed by 12 weeks of project-based tuition at its teaching space in London’s Silicon Roundabout. The Academy runs a new course every six weeks, taking an average of 25 students in each intake.565
Initiatives aimed at supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (paragraph 231)
Go ON UK’s SME Digital Capability Programme
In partnership with BIS, Go ON UK launched its SME Digital Capability Programme. This Programme was designed to empower SMEs across the UK to capitalise on the time and cost savings associated with transacting online whilst maximising productivity and growth.
Go ON UK estimated that in the last year this initiative had inspired 300,000 SMEs to investigate online business opportunities, of which 5,500 had taken further action to transition towards transacting and marketing themselves online.
As the programme enters its second year, the Programme’s focus will be on developing enhanced corporate partnerships and engineering a scalable digital incubation network for SMEs in collaboration with LEPs and Growth Hubs. This will include:
- Inspiring: General communications-led outreach to inspire businesses to take their first digital step, sharing of peer-to-peer and segmented content and explanation of business benefits, using targeted incentives where appropriate to encourage engagement.
- Educating: Explain the available options and provide choices for learning and sharing of best practice, and use online and offline activities to guide the digital development of SMEs.
- Supporting: Signpost and support training and skills development, create modules for the specific enhancement of transactional skills and enable user-defined journeys to acquire a range of advanced skills.
- Promoting: Promote case studies and tell peer-to-peer stories, encourage online community engagement to advocate, support and inspire action.566
Virgin Media and Free:Formers Training Programme
In July 2013, Virgin Media partnered with digital skills provider Free:Formers to conduct an intensive, three week training programme for 25 small businesses in Birmingham. They deliberately targeted businesses from a range of sectors who to date had not invested in digital services and were unconvinced by what broadband could offer them.
Virgin Media and Free:Formers devised a digital training module that started at a very basic level of technical understanding and built to providing advance training on how to code, build a website and populate it with content, embed video and develop a social media strategy. The fast-moving curriculum demanded a classroom-based environment to ensure that the participants could ask questions and build as they learnt.
Virgin Media reportedly received very positive feedback from the group of businesses and at the end of the training programme, and observed a material improvement in the digital capability of all participants.567
Examples of regional specialisms (paragraph 240)
- Michael Gleaves: “The north-west of England is strong in chemistry and material science in effect. That cluster is there, so it makes sense to place the main specific application of graphene technologies or new lightweight material technologies in that area. Glasgow has a heavy industrial heritage and perhaps you would look at something in that area to try to build a cluster around that.”568
- Kevin Baughan: “… information knowledge centres: we have one out in Belfast in Northern Ireland on security. That is flourishing. A whole lot of small industries have appeared [in] that domain or go to medical technology up in Leeds, and you have another set of industries appearing around that, so I think clusters will occur in every subject”.569
- Chris Mairs: “… the car industry, for example around Birmingham and Oxford, you get massive, massive numbers of SMEs setting up around the big players”.570
- Here East: “Here East is the unique cluster on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, occupying the former International Press and Broadcast Centres.”571
- Gerard Grech: “If you take Edinburgh, there are very good computer science courses producing great PhD students with extreme knowledge in artificial intelligence, which is one core capability of the digital economy … Manchester, obviously the arrival of the BBC is creating a huge cluster of knowledge and a critical mass of expertise around digital content development”.572
- Stephanie Daman: “There is a very good example of that [cybersecurity] with the Malvern cluster”.573
- RCUK: “… there is a concentration of expertise and businesses in London’s financial sector, meaning that EPSRC’s [Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council] Centre for Doctoral Training in Financial Computing and Data Analytics (at London’s UCL [University College London], Imperial College and LSE [London School of Economics]) can more easily collaborate with key Financial Sector players including the Bank of England, the Financial Regulators and the Treasury”.574
551 Cyber Streetwise: https://www.cyberstreetwise.com [accessed 15 December 2014]
552 Get Safe Online: https://www.getsafeonline.org [accessed 15 December 2014]
554 DfE is funding a master teacher training programme. The idea of a master teacher is that a practising teacher who is outstanding (according to Ofsted) is paired with a local university and provides CPD for their local schools.
558 See QQ 129–142 (Clare Sutcliffe’s opening remarks)
560 Written evidence from British Sky Broadcasting (DSC0036). See also: http://www.sky.com/academy/about [accessed 8 December 2014]
561 Written evidence from Channel 4 (DSC0099). See also: http://4talent.channel4.com/4talent/about-us [accessed 8 December 2014]
562 Written evidence from City & Guilds (DSC0044). See also: http://www.cityandguilds.com/what-we-offer/centres/14-19-qualifications/techbac [accessed 8 December 2014]
563 Written evidence from UKForCE (DSC0078). See also: http://www.stemnet.org.uk/about-us [accessed 8 December 2014]
564 General Assembly, ‘Our Story’: https://generalassemb.ly/about [accessed 18 December 2014]