TechPathways London

The challenge

TechPathways London sought to help educators to develop their digital skills and to increase knowledge of, and access to, London’s diverse and growing digital sectors. Working closely with industry partners across London's digital and cultural sectors, the programme provided those working with young people the tools to support the skills development required to succeed in the modern workforce. The project resources helped educators improve their own digital skills and better understand the digital careers landscape that their young people are entering. In doing so, we ensured that the guidance shared with their young people is relevant, informed and up-to-date. Armed with this knowledge, London’s young people are able to make more informed choices about digital training and careers, setting themselves up for success.

Our approach

Project resources on the website techpathways.london included:

• A blog containing up-to-date labour market information, features and interviews with people working in London’s digital industries. These include multimedia editor at nature.com Shamini Bundell, Snyk.io product manager Waleed Arshad, and founder of onlinemedialawuk.com Dr Holly Powell-Jones.
• An unconscious bias toolkit, providing educators with a framework to identify, challenge and mitigate bias within their setting, with particular focus on gender and technology. The toolkit is accompanied by the online course ‘Using the Unconscious Bias Toolkit’.
• Face-to-face courses, which have been run in-person or, since the pandemic, as video conferences. Courses have included G Suite for Education in collaboration with Google Education, Game Design in collaboration with Digital Schoolhouse, Digital Careers and Education in collaboration with Mark Martin, and a film careers festival in collaboration with BFI.
• Online courses hosted on the site for participants to take whenever convenient, which will be accessible until April 2023. They include Code Like a Pro – Scratch for future software developers, Creativity with iMovie, and The Future of Work produced in collaboration with Nic Ponsford and the Global Equality Collective
• Briefs for practical classroom challenges created by industry and education professionals, including critical literacy, online media law and digital making
• A fortnightly newsletter featuring upcoming courses, latest labour market information and information about opportunities for young people.

Our impact

Over the course of the project, we worked with 986 London educators from 637 organisations. We engaged with educators through short courses, in-depth courses, briefs and events, including 53 unique live/in-person events (with an average live event rating 5.58 out of 6), as well as 19 online courses and 7 challenge briefs, which remain available for participants to access online until April 2023.

We also built up a network of industry experts who shared their knowledge and advice in courses, briefs and 23 interviews, in which they shared their paths to success and the digital skills that have got them there.

TechPathways London was highlighted as an EdTech 50 organisation, an accolade that recognised its "massive scope".

Feedback from educators was overwhelmingly positive:

In terms of the impact of the programme on the learners these educators work with, feedback suggested that the impact would be:

What next?

The resources on the TechPathways London website will remain live until April 2023 so educators will still be able to access industry interviews, challenge briefs and online courses.

Our project partners at Queen Mary University London have written a research paper on one of the TechPathways courses, ‘Introduction to programming pedagogy for IT professionals’. It has been submitted to a computer science education conference and the QMUL team hopes that the work will be cascaded onwards by those who read our research and those who attended the professional development sessions, enabling TechPathways London to continue to improve the teaching and learning of digital skills for young people – both in London and across the world.