Following last month’s Government re-shuffle - we wrote to recently appointed Secretaries of State and Ministers at the departments for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Education (DfE) and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to congratulate them and to highlight our organisational and relevant policy priorities.
In letters to Secretaries of State Nadine Dorries (DCMS) and Nadhim Zahawi (DfE), relevant ministers in their departments, and the newly appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary at BEIS George Freeman; we highlighted the important apolitical role BCS fulfils as part of our Royal Charter and how our role is to help governments and parliamentarians engage with employers, educators, IT practitioners, academics and the public - to formulate evidence based, objective, authoritative policies that ensure Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science benefits all of society.
Four organisational priorities
To all new appointments, we outlined our four organisational priorities:
- Our digital lives should be in the hands of competent, ethical, and accountable professionals
- Greater diversity and inclusion in the IT profession benefit society
- The Digital Divide is a modern measure of inequality; it can be closed by access to skills as well as technology
- The world will achieve Net Zero more rapidly with support of digital and data technologies
Commitment
In our letters to the DCMS appointments we stated our commitment to:
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- Future tech regulation that stimulates ethical, inclusive and sustainable innovation that drives growth and productivity
- Ensuring digital and data technologies benefit all sectors and regions of the UK
- Scaling the talent pipeline to match the government’s ambitions for the UK to be a digital, computing, and AI global superpower
In our letters to the DfE appointments we stated our commitment to:
- Ensuring computing (which is well-balanced and includes digital literacy, IT, and computer science) is a key part of the national curriculum delivered by well-trained teachers in all schools
- Ensuring that all learners can access a range of relevant, quality, qualifications in digital, IT and computer science and at the end of Key Stage 4, post16 and beyond
- Guaranteeing that all learners have equitable access to high quality learning and training opportunities in IT and digital at the end of Key Stage 4 and onwards into post16 provision and beyond
In our letters to the BEIS appointments we stated our commitment to:
- Scaling the graduate and postdoctoral talent pipeline to match the Government’s ambitions for the UK to be a digital, computing, and AI global superpower
- Ensuring the UK scientific community has the research software engineering capability and capacity to deliver trustworthy, sustainable and reproducible basic research that transfers into world class business innovation
- Continuously developing professionalism in university computing departments to nurture graduates, postgraduates and academics capable of creating digital solutions to the big challenges facing society
We are looking forward to working with the new appointees and their departments on our shared goals.
