This suggestion came during a meeting between the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee at the House of Lords yesterday, which was attended by Spielman as well as Chris Russell, the National Director for Education at Ofsted.

While the overall discussion and questions revolved around many different aspects of schooling and education in Britain, the topic of technology and an apparent disinterest in technology-related school subjects arose numerous times.

“I’ve repeatedly commented publicly on my concerns about the decline in technology in particular, and it distresses me when I go around schools and see splendid facilities lying empty for no very obvious reason,” Spielman said. “And I am told, in schools, that they don’t have many people taking those options.”

On the decline in tech subject uptake — which includes classes like computer science and design and technology — Spielman did point towards systems that require children to make choices about which subjects they’re going to study at a young age as unhelpful.

“We are unusual in this country in being so permissive in allowing children to make life-changing decisions at such an early age; many countries simply don’t give children the opportunities to select themselves out of things at age 13 or 14 the way that we do,” said Spielman.

“If we want more children taking technology subjects throughout the system, then probably removing some of that flexibility and freedom of choice at that age is the only sensible way of achieving that.”

During the meeting, Lord Baker of Dorking — a former education secretary — relayed his displeasure with the drop off in technology subjects, and advocated for curriculums in Britain to reflect the contemporary world.

“Only 13% of children study computing from 11-16; the rest don’t. In fact, computing in schools has dropped by 45% since 2016. We live in the AI age, you know — and that is not covered in our schools today,” he said.

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One particular question posed to Spielman during the meeting concerned whether it was difficult to recruit teachers in tech-oriented subjects.

“There’s always a chicken and an egg in this,” said Spielman. “For example, we touched on making languages non-compulsory at key stage 4 — that led to a rapid falloff in children taking languages to GCSE, which led to a reduction in the number of language teachers the system recruited, which led to reductions in training. […] A change of demand takes time to feed through into qualified teachers able to meet demand.”

Last month, DIGIT reported on the news that Alistair Forbes, the founder of the not-for-profit organisation Scottish Tech Army, called for education authorities to adopt new approaches to inspire students to get into tech, amid a sizeable decline in computer science teachers and the ongoing tech skills gap.