Employers mark down IT education

Employers believe courses should focus more on the role of IT in modern organisations rather than bits and bytes

Employers are increasingly questioning the value of children’s IT education, after an official report found that IT courses are not being taught well enough at school to encourage pupils to take A-levels and degrees in the subject.

The report into IT teaching by schools watchdog Ofsted found that fewer pupils than ever are studying for qualifications in IT at A-level, while the numbers at GCSE level are dropping too. The decline is particularly sharp among girls ­ the number of those studying A-level computing subjects fell by 45 per cent between 2004 and 2007.

Only a quarter of IT graduates are women, and the Ofsted report expressed concern that current conditions will do nothing to improve this imbalance. “This has serious implications for the IT industry, where just one in five workers is female,” it says. Ofsted found that although students used IT well to present their work and communicate ideas, standards in using spreadsheets, databases and programming remained low.

But teaching these skills at such an early level is increasingly irrelevant to employers, according to Lizzie Holman, senior policy adviser in education and skills at business group the CBI.

“The difficulty for schools is to keep up with the pace of IT teaching ­ quite often young people are in advance of the teachers,” she said. “The best employers in this area now say it’s not for education to do specific training but to give them an interest in the subject.”

But the falling numbers of pupils taking IT-specific qualifications (see graph) suggest this is not happening ­ pupils are being put off IT as a subject, despite using technology widely in other areas.

Employers would be much better served by curricula that emphasise how IT can be used as a tool, said Holman.

“A lot of jobs in IT and telecoms depend less on the technical side now and more on business awareness and customer-facing skills ­ a broader range of skills is needed for the modern IT role,” she said.

Employers are more likely to look for a physics, or even better, a maths degree, and then train employees to use specific software or applications themselves, she added. One head of HR at a large financial services firm said that any overly technical skills learned at secondary or further education level would be irrelevant to employers five years later.

“It’s such a fast-moving area that those skills are likely to be outdated. And [computing and IT] degrees are increasingly considered a soft touch compared with a maths degree,” he said.

As IT becomes a more integrated skill ­ taken for granted like reading or writing ­ it is unsurprising that employers are looking for different qualifications, said Ollie Ross, head of research at blue-chip user group The Corporate IT Forum.

“Many of our members are finding that for younger people ­ and especially ‘Generation Y’ graduates ­ IT literacy is something that’s second nature,” she said.

This new breed of IT professionals may be well suited to large IT, financial services and telecoms firms who can take their pick of graduates, but what about the bedrock of smaller and more innovative firms that could produce the next Google?

Here the trend has more serious consequences, according to Peter Scargill, IT chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses ­ particularly in a globalised market where the UK must compete with firms in India and China.

“The decline in GSCEs and A-levels in IT and indeed in other sciences should be a worry to all of us and in particular to small businesses that increasingly need IT skills to help them compete on a level playing field in the world market,” he said.