Student numbers have plunged 40% since 2015
Think tank WorldSkills UK has claimed Britain is facing a digital skills shortage as fewer young people opt to study IT-related subjects at GCSE and A Level. The report [PDF] highlighted a steady decline in the number of Computing and IT students at GCSE level since 2015, falling 40 per cent from a peak of 147,000 to just 88,000 last year. The drop was attributed to the government’s attempt to phase out the old ICT GCSE, which was regarded as a “insufficiently rigorous,” and focused primarily on Office-related skills rather than those most useful for a job in tech, such as programming. Although fewer than 10,000 students were subscribed to a GCSE ICT class in 2020 (less than a tenth of its 2015 figure), the number of students enrolled in a Computer Science GCSE course hasn’t kept up either. Things were relatively better with respect to A Levels, with the decline between 2015 and 2020 measuring five per cent. This reasonably steady trajectory was maintained while ICT courses are gradually displaced by those in Computer Science. Additionally, the number of students studying digital-related apprenticeships grew by 4.9 per cent between the 2017/2018 and 2020/2021 academic years, but still made up only around 5 per cent of apprenticeship starts. The report also identified encouraging numbers of students studying Computer Science at an undergraduate and postgraduate level, with respective growth of 17 and 55 per cent in the years between 2014/2015 and 2018/2019.
