Digitober Stories: Supporting Teen Innovators through the Digital Skills Network
The Digital Skills Network is managed and led by Manchester City Council’s Work & Skills team.
It’s not every day that a corporate meeting is headlined by a group of teenagers.
The Digital Skills Network brings together a range of partners from business, education, local government, and the charity sector interested in supporting the development of accessible digital skills provision in Manchester. Among the many faces checkering the Teams meeting grid each quarter, professionals at every stage of their careers are expected. While sessions have been led by interns, officers, and sector leaders, presenters don’t typically wear their school uniforms!
Dressed smartly in blazers and green and black striped ties, four incredible teenagers surprised attendees at the Digital Skills Network Meeting in October. Betraying astonishingly few nerves, the incredible Robotics Team from Co-op Academy North Manchester were quietly assured as they prepared to take their place among speakers triple their age.
As technology has become more ubiquitous, digital skills have become more important for career progression, maintaining relationships, and navigating every-day life. Manchester is fortunate enough to play home to a range of incredible providers committed to offering equitable opportunities for everyone in Manchester to develop the digital skills needed to take advantage of everything that life in the city has to offer.
Collaboration and knowledge sharing between organisations working towards similar goals can help to drive systemic change at scale. The interests of people in Manchester are best served by partners working together to tackle shared challenges. Developed and led by Manchester City Council’s Work & Skills team, the Digital Skills Network provides opportunities for partners from across a range of different sectors to learn from one another, exchange ideas, and combine their strengths to provide the best digital skills support for people in Manchester.
The Network also serves to uplift and socialise innovative skills initiatives from across the city, with previous meetings highlighting programmes from Manchester’s tech accelerators and incubators, universities and colleges, businesses, and more.
For Co-op Academy North’s Robotics team, the Digital Skills Network meeting presented a unique opportunity to engage with tech sector leaders beyond education. Framed by the assorted miscellany of a school ICT classroom, the team delivered a comprehensive, confident, and engaging presentation that could have put more experienced speakers to shame!
The students described afternoons gathered in the school’s ICT lab, painstakingly building, programming, and coding a robot of their own unique design. With the unwavering support of their ICT teacher, Mr Slattery, the group joined the First Tech Challenge, an annual competition that challenges team to build robots to compete in head-to-head competition.
Opportunities like the First Tech Challenge introduce fundamental STEM skills to students through hands-on learning beyond the classroom environment. After hours spent constructing and deconstructing robot parts, and puzzling over lines of code, students had developed an expansive repertoire of digital skills, all while having fun!
The impact of the programme shone through as students confidently guided Network attendees through their roles and responsibilities during the project, and the challenges they had overcome. Providing students with the guidance and resources to practically experiment with technology has the potential to break down preconceptions of STEM as a lonely and exclusively academic field. The student’s varied responsibilities enabled them to experience the wide variety of strengths needed within the tech industry of the future, including technical, interpersonal and leadership skills. For many young people, trying out a new activity can spark life-long passions, and open doors to futures they may never have imagined possible.
At the annual First Tech Challenge Event in March 2024, the team’s hard work was recognised with the prestigious Think Award, which honours excellence in creativity and engineering.
Despite the team’s success, more support is desperately needed. The Robotics team described ambitious plans for the future of the club, including expanding the number of students in the club and engaging First Tech Challenge alumni to mentor younger students. To ensure the club’s longevity and long-term impact, support from the wider tech community is vital to secure further funding and resources.
By connecting with the Digital Skills Network, students were able to share details on their project and connect directly with influential sector professionals that may otherwise have proved challenging to reach. After a brief pause to shower the team in compliments and congratulations on a compelling pitch, Network members shared advice on the most useful contacts, organisations and grants the team could explore to realise their ambitions of a future for their school where more students are afforded opportunities to practically engage with new technologies.
Manchester City Council and the Work and Skills team are hugely proud to provide a forum where partners passionate about the development of digital skills can connect, share opportunities and best practice, and work together to overcome barriers to success. Manchester’s young people deserve every chance to explore the range of future career possibilities, and to believe that those possibilities are within their reach.
We can’t close the digital divide alone. By working collaboratively, we can harness the wealth of knowledge, passion and expertise that exists in Manchester to lead our city towards a future where everyone can prosper.
If you’d like to learn more about getting involved in the Digital Skills Network, or could help the incredible students of Co-Op Academy North Manchester to achieve their ambitious vision, reach out to Work & Skills Officer Maura O’Brien via the link below.
We believe that everybody in Manchester should be able to benefit from access to new technologies. Find out how we’re working with organisations, businesses, and people to combat digital exclusion in our city:
