Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department has (a) held meetings and (b) exchanged communications with the TechSheCan charity in the last 12 months.

Officials from the Department have engaged with TechSheCan, including as part of the work to look at girls’ engagement in computing through the Digital and Computing Skills Education Taskforce and through the National Centre for Computing Education.

In March 2023, the Department for Education and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology created the Digital and Computing Skills Education Taskforce. The taskforce will harness Government and external expertise to increase the numbers of individuals studying digital and computing qualifications and to attract individuals into digital jobs. One of the key issues the Taskforce will address is the poor gender diversity within computing and digital education and employment. As part of the process of gathering evidence for this workstream, officials met with various charitable organisations seeking to increase the proportion of women and girls taking digital and computing qualifications and ultimately gaining employment within the digital sector. TechSheCan was one of those organisations.

The Department has provided over £100 million of funding for the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) to improve the quality of computing education and increase participation in computing at GCSE and A level. In August 2023, the NCCE met with TechSheCan to discuss opportunities to better support one another, particularly in how we encourage more girls to identify computing as an area in which they can excel. This has included collaborating on the new ‘I Belong’ programme and associated teacher handbook, which has recently launched and aims to improve schools’ awareness of barriers to girls’ engagement with computing. The NCCE will continue to work with TechSheCan to develop an action plan for this academic year, ensuring any engagement provides the greatest benefit to pupils and teachers of computing.