"Kids can build a website in 40 minutes"

Thursday 08 January 2015

Jersey has a unique opportunity to equip young people with the digital skills they will need to get a head start in the workplaces of the next few decades, according to an IT specialist who is deputy head at Beaulieu School.

Rory Steel says that because we can decide our own school curriculum without going through the UK, Jersey has the flexibility to move fast and make digital skills a core part of all teaching.

He says that his students at Beaulieu are producing websites from scratch within 40 minutes, and that he has set a target for one class to design an app to go on their own phones by the end of the year.

In the Unplugged interview in this month’s Connect magazine, which is out now, Mr Steel has also called for businesses to get involved in digital education.

He said: “What we’ve been trying to encourage is for businesses to actually directly get involved with the schools to show what they do. So if your business is a web design business come in for an hour and show us what you do and the kids will do whatever you want.

“But the students today have a unique opportunity where they’ve got things like You Tube which are much more explicit.

“If you’re stuck someone’s actually speaking to you, so what we need to do is show them all the doors, or a vast majority of them, and hope that they get excited by one and then walk through it; because ICT was a very narrow field 20 years ago, but now it’s so vast it’s impossible for a school to teach it all.

“Business wants very specific skills and Jersey and Guernsey are in a unique position because we can decide our own curriculum; a very brave move would be to have no general ICT qualifications required at Key Stage 4, so their GCSE years, and replace those with different courses, which they can specialise in much more; so if you like photography, go off and do photography, if its coding then go down that coding route, or video, or applications.”