Unlocking Opportunities: No One Left Offline: Essential Digital Skills – Ep4

Welcome to Episode 4 of Unlocking Opportunities: No One Left Offline: Essential Digital Skills. This is a new livestream season in partnership with FE News and NCFE. Episode 4 is exploring how and why digital skills are essential for everyone, to unlock opportunities in education and work.

The season is hosted by Michael Lemin from NCFE and Gavin O’Meara from FE News. Episode 4 has a focus on Essential Digital Skills and the guests are:

• Julie Hawker: CEO at Cosmic,  Trustee at Good Things Foundation, South West Regional Representative for FutureDotNow
• David Redden, Commercial Manager and digital specialist at NCFE.

Last week’s show was all about NEETs (Not in Education Employment and Training) – which is essential to reverse the 900,000 16-24 year olds that are NEET. Alarmingly, according to the FutureDotNow Essential Digital Skills Gap report… over half of working age adults can’t perform all 20 digital tasks industry and government agree are essential for today’s workplace.

The report highlights that 1.9 Million working age adults can’t complete any of these tasks, that is double the number of NEETs. David Redden highlighted that 1 in 3 people earning over £75,000 a year cannot do all 20 Essential Digital skills tasks and that 31% are unable to improve their productivity using the organisation’s digital online tools.

The importance of Digital Skills for everyone

The panel discuss Essential digital skills and digital literacy, overcoming barriers and the importance of digital literacy for everyone. We unpack some of the risks a lack of digital skills poses to the government’s mission to “break down barriers to opportunity”.

Gavin, Michael, Julie and David explore some of the risks of introducing more technology into the education system, including emerging tech like AI, without addressing these gaps in essential digital skills first.

Julie Hawker highlighted the Workforce Digital Skills Charter and the Essential Digital Skills Framework. David Redden also highlighted how the 50% drop in females completing GCSE Computer Science could also be having a long term impact on Digital Literacy.

The panel also discuss how digital skills can unlock opportunities to education and employment and remove barriers. Check out the episode below:

Here are the links to Episodes 1, 2 and 3 from the Unlocking Opportunities Livestream:

Labour’s First 100 days (Ep1)

Curriculum and Assessment Review (Ep2)

NEETs and youth employment (Ep3)

In this six-part series, we will cover a range of topics centred around Labour’s commitment to “break down barriers to opportunity”. In its manifesto, the new government outlined an ambition to reform our childcare and education systems and make sure there’s no class ceiling on the ambitions of young people in Britain. Each 30-minute episode will have two hosts and two guests, focusing on the key issues and opportunities to allow the government to achieve its mission and help ensure learners and educators aren’t being left behind.