Experts warn that IT education is in urgent need of an overhaul

Of the 28,787 qualified teachers in the UK, just three hold a degree in computing

IT leaders from enterprises across a range of industries were united today in a call for schools and education authorities to urgently address problems with the way IT is being taught to UK children.

The debate took place at today's Westminster eForum entitled "Skills for the UK Digital Economy - delivering the IT professionals of the future".

There is disconnect between the way that IT is used in the workplace and how it is delivered in the classroom, said attendees.

This observation is highlighted by the finding that of the 28,787 teachers who qualified in the UK in 2010, just three hold a degree in computing, according to IT industry body BCS.

Meanwhile, the proportion of professionals in the IT industry who are under the age of 30 has dropped from 33 per cent in 2001 to just 19 per cent today, in which time the number of over 50s in the industry has doubled, according to findings from industry skills body e-Skills UK.

BT's head of skills, Andy Palmer, said it is time that schools begin to interact with the industry to understand how best to deliver IT education.

"IT education in the UK doesn't align to requirements of future employers or the requirements that our customers have of their future employees," he said.

"GCSE and A-level ICT and computing are focused on using IT to produce outcomes, rather than exploring the application of IT to make improvements to processes or encouraging development of new products and services.

"Study of such nature goes no way to prepare students for employment and does not prepare them technically for the challenges they would face studying computing at university," he said.

He added that the future requirements in the IT industry include knowledge not only of IT, but also of business management and the high level of emotional intelligence necessary to have strong management skills.

"We do also need deep technical people, but these are the exceptions, not the rule," added Palmer.

The curriculum used in schools to study ICT and computing at GCSE and A-Level was also heavily criticised from within the education sector.

Drew Buddie, head of ICT at the Royal Masonic School for Girls in Rickmansworth, argued that even at AS-level, the skills taught to students are not challenging enough and will not prepare them for any sort of future in the IT industry.

"The current AS-level coursework, which is studied by students in year 12, has four main aspects. One is to create a relational database - I don't know what value that has," he said.

"The second is to simply make a mail merge document and provide list of names and data, and that's not very challenging. And the third is something that much younger kids can do: to produce a six-slide slideshow using all the things that we tell those younger kids not to do - things like sound effects and animations. And the fourth is simply to produce a document using Microsoft Publisher. This is where the perception that IT is a froivolous subject to study comes from."

With the UK expected to need an additional 500,000 IT professionals by 2016, and with online business estimated to be worth £100bn to the UK economy, representing 7.2 per cent of the national GDP, e-Skills CEO Karen Price warned that the UK needs to act fast to remedy the impending skills gap or risk losing opportunities overseas to foreign workers or outsourcing firms.

"If we don't act now, our global competitors will be more than happy to pop in - places like India and China have thousands of candidates queuing up to take these roles," she warned.