At the weekend the Chancellor of the Exchequer quietly made a novel addition to the list of conservative images of a longed-for idyll Britain of old. To the smiling milkmaids and warm beer of Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties, and the long shadows on county cricket grounds and invincible green suburbs of John Major in the Nineties, so George Osborne has now added 'the golden age of coding'. He tells of how when he was but a lad on an estate (his family's not the council's) he would idle away his days writing computer code, a bit part player in a phenomenon that created 'an entire generation of gifted British software engineers.' And how he now longs for those days to return. In his rhetoric he implies that schools were the architects of this national triumph in cutting edge skills development, writing of how the golden age came to an end when schools started to focus during the New Labour years only on how to use software rather than create it.
Well, Little Lord Gideon, I'm very sorry (I'm not!) but that is just historically inaccurate, and I know because I had a front row seat in that golden age of which you write. The computer workers that built Britain's technological infrastructure were in the main carefully selected and thoroughly trained by the large organizations of the day. The civil service, the nationalised energy companies, local government, the banks, large companies - they all had conveyor-belt programmer training programmes churning out a steady supply of programmers to meet the needs of the day.The needed programmers weren't available elsewhere, the labour market was short on supply, and so the large organizations got their act together and trained thousands upon thousands through the Eighties and well into the Nineties. I was one of them, being handpicked in 1989 by internal recruiters at the Inland Revenue for extensive training to be a COBOL programmer and then released into a team of programmers who had gone through similar training before me. There were hundreds of us, coding away into the long small hours in concrete towers in Shropshire. Six years' later I was running a similar programme in Nottingham, training new recruits carefully selected for programming at Experian, then part of the FTSE listed Great Universal Stores group of companies. This went on right across Britain, right up until the neoliberal bandwagon had thoroughly built up a head of steam within the land. The writing was on the wall when the Inland Revenue outsourced the IT services it provided to tax assessment and collection offices to an American firm, and the end of the Golden Age was confirmed for me when Experian closed the programmer training programme I was running, switching off the conveyor belt of technical skills development that had seen the company grow from a small credit arm of Midland Household Stores to a company that was adjudged strong enough to stand on its own as a FTSE100 company. Of course, Experian still needed skilled workers, but they, along with the banks and the privatised utilities companies, and the specialist IT service companies, no longer felt the need to train up workers. In the neoliberal world of individual responsibility and global labour forces, the training programmes for new coders came to an abrupt halt. In the new world, if you wanted entry into a career in programming, you had nowhere to turn but to formal education. Now, as my research into IT service support workers shows, formal computing qualifications rather than simply aptitude for computing have become the expectation.
George's golden age of computer programming in schools never existed; the only golden age of computer programming was in industrial and governmental organizations. And now in the collective flexing of neoliberal corporate muscle the old golden age of coding has been pronounced dead. Why trouble corporate budgets by investing in a long-tenured workforce when you can rent one from India and lobby the UK Government to encourage students to spend EUR27,000 (plus compound interest) of their future earnings on training for fragile employment in an ever-changing world of computing?
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