Digital Education

Read about the work we're doing to support innovation in education.

The idea:

To encourage innovation within education and equip young people with the skills they need to thrive in the digital world.

Technology is redefining almost every aspect of our lives. From raising finance for a business to hailing a taxi, managing a long-term health condition to working from home, digital start-ups and innovations are rewriting the rules, creating new products and business models that weren’t previously possible and turning established industries on their heads.

The problem

Our education system isn’t keeping up. Firstly, we’re not equipping young people with the right skills to succeed and innovate in a digital world. Compared to the scale of opportunity that digital technology holds, very few people currently possess either the programming skills or confidence to create new technology, whether websites, apps, computers, robots – or things we can’t even imagine yet.

At the same time, educators aren’t taking advantage of existing technology to enhance learning at scale. All of this adds up to a need – and an opportunity – to rethink education in the UK. We believe this won’t just benefit young people themselves, but society and the economy too. (For more on this, see the background section below).

What are we doing?

At Nesta, we’re looking at ways to improve education from a number of angles: our work spans research, investments and practical programmes.

Our landmark Next Gen report (see below) highlighted the lack of value in the ICT curriculum, which has since been disapplied. More recently, Plan I made the economic case for increasing digital fluency among young people, hailing this as one of 12 key drivers of innovation-led growth.

Here in the Lab, we’ve developed an education programme to improve learning outcomes in the UK, with support from our partners Nominet Trust and the Futurelab at NFER. To achieve our goals, work needs to be done both in and out of the classroom, which is why our work in this space is split across two different projects:

• Digital Makers – A programme to encourage and enable a generation of young people to create, rather than simply consume, technology. Working closely with a consortium of partners, we’re launching a campaign to highlight the benefits of learning web programming and other technical skills. We’re also launching the Digital Makers Fund, to support innovators with bright ideas for significantly increasing the number of young people who participate in digital making

• Decoding learning – Here, we’re looking at how digital tools and products can be integrated within education, to develop new and better ways of learning and improve educational attainment.

Click on the links above for full details of the work we’re doing, updates on our progress and information on how you can get involved.

Additionally, through our £17.6m Impact Investment Fund, Nesta is backing entrepreneurial ideas which address three specific social needs – one of which is improving education and prospects for young people.

The background

You can find out more about the research underpinning our Digital Education programme in the reports below. Click on the thumbnails to read a summary or download the publication in full:

            

Our Digital Education programme is being run with support from our partners: