An initiative will promote greater use of female role models and mentors in schools. The scheme, which includes an initial survey seeking schools’ views on how to tackle gender stereotyping, is a response to research showing that women fill only 18 per cent of digital technology roles in Scotland. Evelyn Walker, of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, chair of the Gender Work Stream for Digital Technologies Skills, said role models and mentors were “incredibly valuable” in showing the broad range of routes into IT. The project will be run by Girl Geek Scotland.

Schools, colleges and youth centres have been offered help in registering pupils for the May council elections, the first in which 16- and 17-year-olds will be eligible to vote. Registration events can be held from 1 March, with a wide range of resources for educators available from the Electoral Commission. Several Scottish secondary schools have already used the hashtag #ReadyToVote on Twitter to indicate their intention to help young people to cast their vote on 4 May.

Newbattle Community High School is to become a centre of excellence for digital industry skills, from film and video production to programming and coding. Pupils will also be able to work on games development, robotics and music production. Midlothian Council, which has approved the allocation of £56,000 from reserves to appoint a centre coordinator, hopes that the Newbattle pilot project will eventually lead to more centres of excellence in the area’s seven secondary schools.

Television dramas may be persuading a significant number of young people to become teachers, an analysis suggests. Two-fifths of millennials said that television shows had influenced their choice of career. Lawyers were the profession most likely to be depicted in TV dramas, with teachers in sixth place, just behind journalists and in front of cooks.

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