The Sector Panel for Computing met last week (via Teams). There was an excellent attendance. The purpose of the Panel is to provide advice and guidance to me and my team to ensure that we’re not missing external trends and ensuring that the qualification portfolio is up-to-date. It comprises representatives of business, industry, colleges, schools, universities, training centres, local authorities and national bodies, as well as educational experts. Last week’s meeting was a little different because I invited DataLab and…

The Ada Scotland Festival is a series of online events focused on addressing gender imbalance in Computing Science education in Scotland. The University of Glasgow’s Dr Matthew Barr leads on the initiative, alongside Festival co-founders Dr Ella Taylor-Smith (Edinburgh Napier University) and Toni Scullion (dressCode) and a voluntary advisory board, drawn from across the sector. The Ada Scotland Festival brings together organisations who are keen to bring more women and girls into computing and IT. It is: •  a celebration, aligned to Ada…

Regular readers will know that we’re currently developing a suite of Higher National (HN) awards as part of “HN Next Gen”. One of that suite is HND Data Science. Unlike the other qualifications in this development, HND Data Science is a new qualification (the others are existing qualifications that we’re updating). We had planned to develop an HND in Data Science some time ago, but it made sense to make it one of the first new types of HN qualifications.…