Let's get our kids coding

Britain is a proud leader in technical innovation, but now we risk throwing away that great heritage. It's time we plugged the IT skills gap in our schools.

There is a skill gap in the UK. That much appears clear. The Times ran an editorial this week lamenting the failure of our education system to have produced anything in the way of technical colleges. The Independent on Sunday produced something similar complaining that while graduates have invested siginificantly in their educations, the skills they gain from it don't necessarily transfer into graduate level jobs.

There is now a general discussion going on about the extent to which universities should be providing vocational courses and the extent to which they should be providing academic courses. But within all this I suspect we are missing a trick.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.