WIREDGOV

Measures to give teachers the support they need to teach pupils ICT skills such as coding, computer programming and cyber security has been announced.

Organisations are invited to run the first ever National Centre of Computing Science Education, the School Standards Minister Nick Gibb has announced.

The national centre, along with 40 leading schools across the country, will help improve teaching of the computing curriculum and is supported by a new programme which will train up to 8,000 computing teachers on the latest digital skills – that is enough to ensure every secondary school in England has a teacher who can support pupils to succeed.

The digital sectors contributed £118bn to the economy in 2015 and an estimated 1.2m more people with specialist digital skills are needed by 2022. By ensuring the next generation has the technological skills we need we can help to maintain the UK’s position as a leading global digital economy.

New measures to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure & digital services from cyber attacks and computer network failure have come into force.

Bosses of firms in health, water, energy, transport & digital infrastructure will now be expected to have robust safeguards in place against cyber threats and report breaches & network outages to regulators within 72 hours or they face fines of up to £17m.

Fines would be a last resort and will not apply to operators which have assessed the risks adequately, taken appropriate security measures and engaged with regulators but still suffered an attack.

Green Paper on Child Mental Health is unambitious and ignores hundreds of thousands of children, say Committees.

NHS England has confirmed that new & expectant mums will be able access specialist perinatal mental health community services in every part of the country by April next year.

The health service is now spending £23m rolling out the second wave of community perinatal services to underserved parts of the country and is on course to achieve full geographical coverage, when as recently as 2014 it was estimated that only 3% of the country had good access to perinatal mental health care.

Specialist community perinatal mental health teams can offer psychiatric & psychological assessments and care for women with complex or severe mental health problems during the perinatal period. They can also provide pre-conception advice for women with a current or past severe mental illness who are planning a pregnancy.

The Prosperity from Space strategy sets out a vision for enhanced growth in the UK space sector over the next decade.

Published by the Space Growth Partnership on 11 May 2018, the strategy focuses on 4 sector priorities:

• Earth information services including navigation, analytics & security
• Connectivity services – global connectivity anywhere from any device
• In-space robotics – for science enterprise, consumers
• Low-cost access to space

This week we highlight a well-argued report from Think Tank Policy Exchange, which brings into question just how ‘impartial’ the ‘Remainer Peers’ in the HoL are in their examination of the RoI / NI border issues of Brexit.

According to PX, the Irish border is not the insoluble obstacle to Brexit negotiations that it has been made out to be and the UK can leave the single market & customs union while preserving a frictionless border in Ireland.

This can be achieved by the use of new technology and in the context of a Free Trade Agreement between the UK and EU, in an arrangement that goes beyond the Customs Partnership and in no way threatens the Good Friday Agreement.