Educating Britain's young people for the next industrial revolution

“We missed an opportunity,” says Professor Chris Melhuish, director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), a collaborative research centre and technology business incubator on the outskirts of the city. Melhuish, a former teacher and now leading protagonist on the UK’s robotics scene, talks about how, in the late 70s, UK schools used to teach computer studies and computer science before downgrading it and focusing on “word processing and mouse skills”.

“We were well ahead 25-plus years ago but then we threw it away and now we are trying to play catch up,” he says, pointing out that computer science “is a fabulous vehicle for teaching logic and planning”.

Few would disagree. But can we catch up fast enough? For a whole generation, learning about robots has meant little more than sci-fi films like Terminator and copying footballer Peter Crouch’s goal celebrations. Today things are a little different. There are courses on robotics at a number of universities, and schools now have a relatively coherent plan to teach computer science at various key stages.

In 2012, the Computing at School (CAS) group released its curriculum claiming that “like numeracy and literacy, there is a cognitive strand of computing that offers valuable thinking skills to learners of all ages”. A collaboration between BCS, Google, Intellect and Microsoft, CAS’s proposed computing curriculum formed the basis for government thinking and led to the launch last September of coding lessons for primary school children.

According to Bill Mitchell, education director at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, the UK is the first country in the world to make computing a statutory school subject for all children from the age of five, but adds: “We currently have, at best, 40% of schools able to teach it confidently, so there is a lot of work still to be done there.”

A number of the less confident teachers are defaulting to computer-based learning sessions for their students, using curriculum tools such as Espresso. Fair enough. They have to start somewhere. Mitchell is more than aware of this and points to the growth in teacher training, using a network of CAS lead schools to help regionally. Over 1,200 schools have registered, with 400 signing up as a CAS lead school for their area. Both CAS master teachers and CAS lead schools are working with over 70 CAS university partners in their local area.

But is this enough? Will this give students a good enough grounding in tech to enable them to be more proficient in computing as they move through the later key stages in secondary school and university?

Mitchell says: “We were very concerned to ensure computing is first and foremost about computational thinking skills that are future proof, and not just about coding. That means children are taught the principles and concepts that will underpin all future digital technology for decades to come, including the internet of things (IoT), which means children will be able to understand those technologies, however novel or innovative they are.”

It’s a view supported by Melhuish, who says the opportunity to teach programming through robotics is “fabulous”. The opportunity to link creativity with design and the logic of programming is one that should be grabbed with both hands, he says.

It’s the sort of approach championed by leading educational commentator Sir Ken Robinson and one that would surely support his view for a revolution in teaching. The fear, though, is that we will compromise and not embrace the ideas fully or skimp on other areas which have influence, thereby undermining their true potential. This could be manifested by poor equipment, a lack of bandwidth or even teacher apathy. And then there is politics. History has shown us that governments of all shades like to tinker with education and curriculums to impose their own ideologies.

Mitchell has a warning: “The new curriculum is only just getting started in schools, so it is vital that as a country we make sure it succeeds over the long term and it does not become neglected as happened back in the 80s when we first tried to introduce it into schools.”

So are we good enough now? While we wait for the new coding generation to mature, is there enough talent now to cope with the growing demands for new technologies, such as the IoT and the robotics and automated systems that will help drive it? No one, it seems, is sitting comfortably at the thought of this.

The problem is scale. The UK has a rich history of innovators, inventors and scientists but has always struggled with scale or longevity. There are, of course, a few exceptions but there is a concern that despite some clever work in places like BRL, we will miss the mass market boat again and watch other countries grow rich on the proceeds of the new industrial revolution that is IoT.

“The UK is in better shape than many countries, but we could easily be left behind if we don’t focus on scaling up the truly world-class strengths we have,” says Mitchell. “We have excellent universities who produce some of the most able graduates in the world, but we don’t produce enough of them to fill the demand from employers.”

In November last year, the Perkins Review said pretty much the same thing for engineering so it’s not as if governments don’t know this stuff or at least get access to state-of-play reports. Melhuish talks about the “insight” of former minister of state for universities and science, David Willetts, for including robotics in the government’s Eight Great UK Technologies. To be honest, it wasn’t a hard one to call but at least he did it.

So how do we overcome this shortfall in skills? One answer is to encourage more gender equality in the sciences and build the confidence of talented female learners. A report from thinktank OECD suggests low expectations from parents and teachers are in large part to blame for this.

IT Industry consultant and strategist Dr Peter Chadha, chief executive of DrPete Technology Experts, suggests there are students outside computer science that may be viable candidates.

“I don’t think students are very aware of what the UK technology industry has to offer them,” he says. “The IT industry has high barriers to entry – because generally it takes on people who have already shown an aptitude and have qualifications in some aspect of technology.”

Why is this? “The UK economy is heavily biased towards finance and services. While we do have people developing things in their bedrooms, and in outposts of technology innovation like in the Cambridge area and Tech City, we don’t have the agglomeration of software development that is found in India, the US and Israel, for example. We need to encourage upgrade technologists to participate in education and training to avoid shipping our great ideas abroad.”

Chadha is not alone in thinking this could happen to IoT and robotics. Perhaps in the past, education ministers and analysts could be accused of being too faddish. Analyst Gartner has, after all, placed IoT at the peak of its hype chart, where it is tottering on the edge before it plunges down the slope of disillusionment. But Gartner has fed a lot of this hype with reports in 2013 and again in 2014 claiming IoT could be a $1.9 trillion market by 2020. Accenture, too, has got in on the act, claiming in its report that on an industrial level IoT could boost the UK economy by $531bn (£352bn) by 2030.

“The whole business of getting intelligent machines to physically interact with the world and people is the next revolutionary step for industry,” says Melhuish, confirming that it is a market worth chasing and worth training for, although he points out that in his field “robotics is more than sandwich-making and welding”.

With Asian countries and many of our European neighbours now consistently outperforming the UK in maths and science league tables, the worry is that we might have left it a little too late. Yet there is hope. The UK has some of the world’s top-ranked universities in engineering and technology and it’s also a hotbed for entrepreneurship, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Index. It’s something to hold onto. While international student numbers on Stem courses are declining, according to a Lords report last year, the number of UK-based students accepted onto Stem courses has been increasing. It’s a small step but one that suggests we are moving in the right direction.

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