Digital Technology Education Charter

We are delighted to announce the launch of our Digital Technology Education Charter. A National movement support Computing Science at schools in Scotland. This Charter is powered by dressCode and lead by our founder Toni Scullion. Below you can find out what it is and why we need it.

Sign up at www.dtecharter.org

What is it? 

The Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review by Mark Logan highlighted a number of challenges Scotland faces with regard to Computing Science at school and put education at the heart of the solution. The Digital Technology Education Charter recognises that if industry and education can work more closely together and join forces we can make a real impact.

This charter is for individuals, schools, colleges, universities, and organisations of all sizes from all sectors. If you want to do more to help inspire the next generation and encourage them to choose Computing Science then join our charter. Together we can do more, we can make a difference.

What makes our charter different is our team. We have industry leaders in Scotland but also a group of dedicated Computing Science teachers. We are also working in partnership with Computing Science Scotland, a national network to support teachers delivering Computing Science in Scotland. By joining the Digital Technology Education Charter we can help promote any specific Computing Science initiatives directly to Computing Science teachers of Scotland who are on the ground working hard to inspire and engage pupils. More than this if you have an idea or an initiative that you would like to get feedback on or help shape the dedicated team of Computing Science teachers can support with this. Throughout the year we will also be running events with the aim of bringing both organisations and Computing Science teachers together to network and come up with ideas of what more we can all do together to make a difference.

Why do we need it?

It has been well documented that Computing Science at schools in Scotland has been dramatically declined over the years. At the turn of this century around 20,000 pupils were studying the subject at secondary but this has dropped to barely 10,000 and with the proportion of girls remaining more or less static at around 20 percent.

We know that we need to inspire pupils into the subject at an early age. We do not have enough pupils coming through and if we don’t do something at the school level we are not going to have a talent pool so you won’t have Scottish kids coming up through the system, creating their own companies, investing back into Scotland, and creating revenue.

Computing Science is integral to every single industry, we need to solve this problem. We have got the talent in Scotland, we have the energy and will for change amongst the Computing Science teachers community, industry and organisations. We have the global brands, we just need to pull it together and I hope that this charter will help build the bridge between industry and education and ultimately play a big role in inspiring the next generation into Computing Science.