A GENERATION of Scottish school pupils have grown up in the digital age not knowing how to programme computers, experts have warned.
Harvey Wheaton, chief executive of Edinburgh-based digital skills academy Codeclan, said a “blind spot” in the education system had left Scotland with a significant skills gap.
Currently there are some 11,000 digital job vacancies every year in Scotland, but only half of these are filled.
The aim of Codeclan, which is backed by Skills Development Scotland, is to create a new generation of software developers by offering courses to adult learners.
Mr Wheaton said: “The whole world is digital and every business is a software business because, whatever you are doing, software is at the heart of it.
“That means being able to programme is critical to everything we do and therefore the demand for that as the world moves on and as computers move on is constantly increasing.
“However, the education system has not identified this as an important enough factor and we have lost a generation or more of people who don’t understand what programming is.”
Mr Wheaton, who is planning further expansion of Codeclan into Glasgow, said the negative impact of the skills gap was significant.
He added: “The economy is not going to survive without these skills because the future is digital.
“Without that talent in Scotland people are going to look elsewhere and bring people in from or look at other locations in the world to set up business.”
Codeclan offers intensive courses with the aim of creating a new generation of software developers with the skills employers need.
The development of the skills academy comes at a time when some secondaries have closed their computing science departments blaming a lack of interest from pupils.
A report by national schools body Education Scotland said: “In too many schools, computing science has diminished in popularity. The subject can too easily become a sterile and functional experience, lacking in creativity.”
In 2011, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said the UK was throwing away its “great computer heritage” by failing to teach programming.
Meanwhile, Rowena Arshad, head of the Moray House School of Education at Edinburgh University, called for all children to be taught coding from primary school to a bid to address the issue.
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