How do we prepare young people for the digital world? And how do we use digital technology to make our schools better? These were the questions Minister of Education Claude Meisch sought to answer during his address on Saturday’s “Engineer Day”.
And the future is digital: for 44% of companies in Luxembourg, the main challenge lies in finding people with the necessary qualifications, knowledge and training, and 23% of these businesses are looking for new staff. It’s clear then, what needs to happen. Our present-day education system needs to prepare students for the future.
While environmental technologies and renewable energy are still in constant flux, they promise a need for young people who are fascinated by and invested in topics such as digitisation, mathematics and science. If there is one thing separate actors within the field agree upon, it’s that this digital education is necessary to ensure that Luxembourgish companies of the future will not suffer this deficiency to an even greater extent.
From the onset, schools should play a significant part in this equation, which is why coding is now being introduced in the fourth cycle of the primary school curriculum, alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Schools currently do not provide the skills that society needs, Meisch proclaimed, taking the opportunity to announce a new initiative for secondary school starters: computer science. It would no longer do to spend all day on a smartphone. Pupils needed to learn how to question things, be creative, innovative and search for solutions.
This state of affairs also demonstrates that there is a considerable backlog demand for these skills. The key issue here being: a deficit of problem-solving expertise. This has lead to the opening of a new college in Belval where a pilot project will see how secondary schools can best respond to these needs.
