ICT, a Skill for Life Alan Clarke Associate Director - ICT and Learning NIACE

Decision In 2003 White Paper 21 st Century Skills Realising Our Potential, the United Kingdom Government acknowledged that ICT was a new skill for life alongside literacy and numeracy

Background million adults do not use ICT and a large proportion of them do not see the relevance of ICT to their lives 2.About 3 million rejected it after some experience 3.Tend to be older and poorer 4.90% of new jobs and 70% of existing ones require some degree of ICT skills 5.Employers tending to demand a higher degree of ICT skills from their employees 6. About 700,000 adults (over 16) are supported through publicly funded courses to learn ICT skills

Background Wide range of existing qualifications (e.g. OCR Clait, ECDL and C&G Equals) 8. A large proportion fail to complete courses (I.e. 46%) 9. The use of E-learning is rapidly growing across all parts of adult education 10. Lots of interest in embedding ICT within other subjects 11. Government services are increasingly becoming available online and the trends is towards E- government/E-citizenship

Implementation Process Define ICT Skill for Life standard ( National ICT Skill for Life Curriculum ( and DfES publication) Action Research ( New Entry Level (Beginners) Qualifications (e.g. OCR) Pathfinder – pilot new qualifications Teacher Training (NIACE and LSDA)

Other Parallel Developments ICT as part of e-learning Department for Education and Skills Standards Unit ICT programme MyGuide Pilot - Cybrarian Functional Skills

Integrating/Embedding ICT Divide into small groups and consider how you could integrate the teaching of ICT with other subjects? E.g. Literacy, Numeracy, ESOL, Creative Writing, Financial Education etc.

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