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Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Greater Manchester 'can hit the ground running' amid huge AI school plans
One million students will be prepared for jobs of the future thanks to a new artificial intelligence (AI) training programme. Around £187m will be invested in the national skills programme to bring digital skills and AI learning into classrooms and communities, the Prime Minister has announced. It comes as the government aims for 7.5m workers across the UK to gain essential AI skills by 2030. Research commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) reveals that by 2035, around 10m workers will be in jobs where AI will be part of their role or responsibilities in some form, with a further 3.9m people in positions directly in AI. READ MORE: Boy, 14, stabbed to death named and pictured amid huge murder investigation READ MORE: Manchester murder investigation LIVE updates as police make arrests and seal off house after boy, 14, killed This week, Rachel Reeves will announce billions of pounds to 'turbo-charge' the tech sector as part of her long-term spending plans. Ahead of the Chancellor's Spending Review on Wednesday (June 11), the Prime Minister has announced a £187m 'national skills drive'. TechYouth, the 'flagship' strand of this programme which is backed by £24m of government funding, promises to give 1m students over three years across every secondary school in the UK the chance to learn about technology and gain new career opportunities. It builds on the CyberFirst programme which has already helped hundreds of thousands of young people gain cyber security skills. Last week, Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle was at Salford's MediaCityUK to see the scheme for himself. Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, he said the new initiative will be delivered locally, using facilities such as those available at MediaCityUK. He said: "For Greater Manchester, you can see that you already have in MediaCity the physical ability to grasp the new resources that the government is going to be putting into skills development. "So in other words, you've got the space and the resources that can cope with the massive upscaling that we're going to be delivering for cyber skills and cyber skills development into the future. "Whereas other parts of the country are going to have to find the space, you can hit the ground running." According to the government, in each of the UK's regions and nations, a local delivery partner will be selected by DSIT, to run the programme and deliver activities to schools and colleges in local areas. The TechFirst programme also promises to support over 4,000 graduates, researchers, and innovators through three additional strands. With £96.8m, TechGrad will support 1,000 'exceptional' domestic students a year with undergraduate scholarships, TechExpert will give up to £10,000 in additional funding to 500 domestic PhD students conducting research in tech, with a total of £48.4m to spend, while with £18, TechLocal will offer seed funding to help regional innovators and small businesses develop new tech products and adopt AI. Major industry players including IBM, BAE Systems, QinetiQ, BT, Microsoft and the Careers & Enterprise Company have backed the initiative. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: 'We are putting the power of AI into the hands of the next generation – so they can shape the future, not be shaped by it. 'This training programme will unlock opportunity in every classroom – and lays the foundations for a new era of growth. 'Too many children from working families like the one I grew up in are written off. I am determined to end that. 'This programme is the Plan for Change in action – breaking down barriers, driving innovation, and giving every young person the chance of a good, well paid job and a bright future.'
The Herald Scotland
21-05-2025
- The Herald Scotland
How one Glasgow school used new courses to open pathways for pupils
In an effort to open up the options available to young people, staff at Hyndland decided to introduce a new qualification: a National Progression Award in Computer Games Development. The experience with that course was largely positive. The lack of an exam at the end of a NPA was a key benefit for many, and the school found that young people taking part were more engaged because they were being permitted to focus on and pursue a really specific area of interest. So when a new NPA in Cybersecurity was introduced in 2015, the school once again decided to give it a go. But even with their existing experience of these courses, and a committed Computing Science department, this new programme seemed daunting, with students to be given the chance to explore areas such as data security, digital forensics and, most worrying of all, ethical hacking. Fortunately, the department's earlier work paid off at this point when a former student now working in the field offered to work with the school to establish the programme. 'I thought it sounded really interesting,' explains George Mullin, a computing teacher at the school, 'and one of my ex-pupils had gone on to study cyber security at Glasgow Caledonian University. We were still in touch with each other so I mentioned it to him and he was really generous with his time. He was showing me the systems that the university used and I thought that looked fantastic.' Despite the enthusiasm for developing the course, the technical logistics were still an issue – but when the university agreed to allow teachers and pupils to use their software, the possibilities really opened up. 'We became a pilot school to basically get this up and working, and obviously we had to configure that to match the needs of the NPA course that we're delivering. So there was a lot of work done around that and ironing out the kind of technical issues, but once we had that proof of concept we thought we could roll that out to other schools in Glasgow that are looking at deliver the NPA.' CyberFirst lead teacher at Hyndland Secondary George Mullin (Image: Gordon Terris) Today, schools across Glasgow benefit from this relationship with Glasgow Caledonian University, allowing many more young people to pursue a course that may otherwise have remained too difficult to deliver. Mr Mullin is also keen to highlight the support of Education Scotland, which in recent years has provided access to a platform called TryHackMe. The support they have received, combined with the hard work of staff, has helped to ensure that these new courses can offer real value for students at Hyndland: 'We could do the bare minimum and just get through the course but because we've got these toys, for want of a better expression, to play with it makes it a much richer learning experience for the kids.' That is clearly beneficial for those completing this particular programme, but the school has also seen wider benefits. Some of those completing NPA courses in the school's Business and Computing Faculty have used them as a bridge between National 5 and Higher qualifications, and broader interest in Computing Science as a subject also seems to have improved. And benefits go further still. The success of these innovations has helped school to develop other NPA offers and even inspired more options for BGE. One example of this work has culminated in Hyndland achieving the Gold Award in the CyberFirst programme, which has been developed by the National Cyber Security Centre in GCHQ, and coming first in Scotland for the recent Cyberfirst Girls' Competition. According to headteacher Louise Edgerton, the success of programmes like Cybersecurity the NPA show the importance of opening up 'pathways' for students in schools, and working to ensure that as many options as possible are made available to them. And for the computing department, the results are clear: 'We've get kids in our department now that we probably wouldn't have if we weren't offering these opportunities,' Mr Mullin says. 'That's the bottom line.'
