Government under pressure to change IT curriculum

The e-skills week saw broad agreement among experts on the need for the government to improve the IT curriculum and teaching in UK schools, but a number of commentators also suggested that the lack of IT professionals and poor IT skills held by business users can only be stemmed if the subject starts to be seen as cool and begins to attract women.

Richier discussed the need for a "broad spectrum alliance" between the government, business and media to better promote the profession to young people. "The image of the IT practitioner will soon no longer be a nerd," he said.

Richier's call to promote the profession was joined by the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), a non-profit association based in Brussels.

ACT president Jonathan Zuck suggested that policymakers could put in place a tax incentive for businesses to train workers to stay up to date with the latest IT technologies.

"Empowering employers with the ability to train their workers through tax incentives can be more effective than funding grants," he said.

Sue Black, head of the department of information and software systems at the University of Westminster, argued that young people need better IT role models. "For example they should have someone in EastEnders in an IT role," she said.

Richier continued to discuss the lack of women in IT. An expected shortage of over 350,000 IT practitioners in five years' time means that Europe needs to consider making the profession more appealing to half of its resource pool, he said, referring to the fact that only one in five IT practitioners are women, yet in other sciences the number of women has been increasing.

"In ICT there were more women in the profession proportionate to men in the 1980s than there are now. This is the only science where they are declining," he said.

Richier explained that part of the European Commission's strategy is to get more women into board positions. "The head of Europe's digital strategy is a woman, which is a positive start," he said.

Meanwhile, Maggie Berry, director of Women in Technology, maintained that the lack of women studying IT is down to poor mentoring and the absence of role models.

"I think that the use of social networking sites means that girls can follow leading IT entrepreneurs from all over the world. If women were to go into schools to talk about IT courses, it plants a seed that it is an option for girls," she said.

Berry added that students should be given more work experience, and that there should be more compulsory options in science and IT, even at university level.

Not specifically addressing the IT women shortfall, Berry suggested that schools could help fight the decreasing numbers of IT practitioners by covering a wider range of subjects in their technology courses, including hardware, networks, telephony, mobile communications, software design, gaming and imaging.