It’s difficult to imagine how a home education environment could perfectly replicate the teaching environment for technical subjects such as physics, food technology or digital skills. The teaching of technical subjects is often cited to home educating parents as a significant benefit of mainstream schooling.
But the presence of tech facilities in schools doesn’t necessarily lead to their successful adoption. This week The Learning & Work Institute released research that pointed out a few unfortunate statistics about the teaching of digital skills in schools and the eventual usefulness of those skills in employment.
The report was covered by BBC News online, the Guardian and other news outlets. Here’s the original Learning and Work Institute report.
The take-home of this article comes from the chief executive of the commissioning body for this report. Dr Neil Bentley-Gockmann points out four main reasons why the digital skills shortage is steadily climbing across the country:
- a lack of clearly-defined job roles in certain fields
- a lack of understanding and guidance about potential career paths
- a lack of relatable role models
- a difficulty in making many technical professions seem appealing to young people, especially young women
This report seems to show that it is not necessarily true that schools adequately equip students with the digital skills needed for the world of work. If you’re a home educating parent this may be cold comfort. You may feel that you are no more equipped (literally) to see your children successfully adopt digital skills. But home education’s advantage is in being so much more agile compared to the large state school mechanisms. So, if we know what the issues are, perhaps we can address them for our own children. And for many parents those four bullet points are neither insurmountable nor rooted in the presence of advanced technology in the home.