Codebreaker school for gifted teenagers

A new sixth form college in Bletchley Park is to be opened to equip teenagers with the skills required to become codebreakers. The school aims to fill the gap currently not accounted for in Britain’s national security workforce. The boarding school, aptly called ‘The College of National Security’, will be open free of charge to nearly 500 of the most talented applicants and will teach skills including cyber skills, logical thinking and problem solving along with other subjects such as physics, maths and computer science. Alastair MacWillson, chair of Qufaro, the not-for-profit consortium of cybersecurity experts which is responsible for the initiative, considers a cyber threat to be the biggest national security challenge for Britain in the 21^st century and estimates that currently there are only 700,000 cybersecurity experts in Europe. The ‘Internet Security Threat Report’ presented findings in 2016 which revealed that nearly 75% of online websites have serious issues around security and privacy. MacWillson is aiming to get state funding for the school from the Department for Education, but if that fails, the school will still be free of charge and will rely on funding from corporate sponsors instead. Read more here.