The report that two out of every three staff lack basic information technology and computing skills (TES, December 6) gives one a sense of deja vu. We’ve had computers in schools and colleges for more than 30 years, and the problem has always been the same. It’s likely to remain so because technology evolves at such a speed.
Unless you keep up to date with the changes, you fall behind. Your skills become as obsolete as old computer languages. The problem is that the technology is altering the nature of employment, and is becoming ever more elaborate and sophisticated. The understandable reaction of teachers, seeing their security threatened by students who are more proficient at IT than they are themselves, is to have as little to do with it as possible.
Whatever happened to that “age of leisure” we were all promised in the 1970s? It all vanished in the haze. Many have to work longer hours than ever! I’m afraid it all seems one big “con” to me.
MF WILLIMOTT
59 Saddlebow Road King’s Lynn Norfolk
