EDUCATION WEEK: Livingstone-Hope Review details how UK can transform games academia
The long-awaited Livingstone-Hope Review has launched today with a call for the UK Education Department to make critical changes across the entire talent pipeline.
The significant 88-page paper calls for new approaches at schools, at colleges, across universities and at within the games industry itself.
Scroll below to find all 20 recommendations published in full
Bring computer science into the National Curriculum as an essential discipline.
Sign up the best teachers to teach computer science through Initial Teacher Training bursaries and ‘Golden Hellos’.
Use video games and visual effects at school to draw greater numbers of young people into STEM and computer science.
Set up a one-stop online repository and community site for teachers for video games and visual effects educational resources.
Include art and computer science in the English Baccalaureate.
Encourage art-tech crossover and work-based learning through school clubs.
Build a network of STEMNET and Teach First video games and visual effects Ambassadors.
Introduce a new National Video Games Development and Animation Schools Competition.
Design and implement a Next Generation of Video Games and Visual Effects Talent Careers Strategy.
Provide online careers-related resources for teachers, careers advisers and young people.
Develop kitemarking schemes, building on Skillset accreditation, which allow the best specialist HE courses to differentiate themselves from less industry-relevant courses.
Higher Education Funding Council for England should include industry-accredited specialist courses in their list of ‘Strategically Important and Vulnerable’ subjects that merit targeted funding. Industry commits to these courses through industrial scholarships and support for CPD for lecturers.
Raise awareness of the video games and visual effects industries in the eyes of STEM and arts graduates.
Give prospective university applicants access to meaningful information about employment prospects for different courses.
Develop a template for introducing workplace simulation into industry-accredited video games and visual effects courses, based on Abertay University’s Dare to be Digital competition.
Leading universities and Further Education colleges sponsor a high-tech creative industries University Technical College (UTC), with clear progression routes into Higher Education.
Kitemark Further Education courses that offer students the best foundation in skills and knowledge to progress into Higher Education.
Skillset Creative Media Academies and e-skills UK’s National Skills Academy for IT to work with industry to develop specialist CPD training for video games and visual effects industries.
Support better research-oriented university-industry collaborations in video games and visual effects.
Continue to treat the 18 visual effects occupations on the Government’s shortages list as shortage occupations.
I'll leave Schools for someone else; it's been too long since I was a Physics and Maths teacher for me to feel qualified.
UNIVERSITIES, COLLEGES AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
11
Can these kitemarks also recognise academic excellence. Universities are Learning, not Training, establishments.
12
Don't forget Scotland and Wales! Or non-accredited courses (all were once lacking accreditation) in strategic funding. Sadly, this is too late for Newport, as the BSc Games Development & A.I. Award was cut in recent austerity measures. Others will probably follow.
13
And vice versa.
14
AND working conditions in those Industries. It's sad to hear when one of your best former students gets laid off, for example. In an industry where you can't put incomplete projects on your CV, what good has the last two years of his career been?
15
Much as I support and admire Dare, £25,000+ for 5 students for 10 weeks is unsustainable. Better models of work-based simulation exist, which are more realistically costed. Newport (and many overs I'm sure) has one recognised by the HEA, WAG and other bodies as an example of "best practice".
16
Hard to see why leading HE/FE institutions would support the UTC, rather than doing what they're already doing; need more information.
17
Recognition for Foundation Degrees and the excellent work done by post-16 education has been a ling time coming.
18
The few get fewer.
19
But the teaching-oriented universities - made that way by forced selective Government funding - are actually better placed to consider vocational, practical, inter-disciplinary, applied research. They've had to be.
20
Putting an animal on the Endangered List, but doing nothing else will not save that species.
The summary report posted places a strong focus on core computing skills, which seems eminently sensible.
Many of us who recruit newly graduated artists often wish there was a strong focus on core art skills alongside the tools skills. It will be interesting to see if this is mentioned in the full report.
I think point 14 "Give prospective university applicants access to meaningful information about employment prospects for different courses." is a splendid idea.
I don't like the trend of treating videogames development as a special-case that demands specialised education.
On the code side at least, I find that the best candidates come from traditional, high-quality, challenging computer science degrees and present a demo or project which is 100% their own work in a games related area.
In a graduate, we are looking for a mixture of raw talent and good education in the fundamentals of programming and computer science. We can teach them the games-specific bit. We can improve their C++. We want diamonds in the rough we can polish up. For us, learning about the fundamentals of computer science is time better spent than learning about current industry techniques which change every few years.
Computer games isn't a variant or subset of computer science: it's a little bit of all of it, and a challenging, quickly evolving field at that.
Students should be very wary when choosing a degree course. Universities are not altruistic. They are a business and continue to exist by running courses that to an increasing extent student directly pay for. I see a lot of CV’s and can see that this is driving a trend for universities to promise more, reduce entry requirements and deliver less. If courses don’t attract enough students or are too challenging then more students leave and the course funding decreases risking the lecturer’s salaries. No one wants their job to be at risk so it’s in their interest to market and adapt the course appropriately.
Given the investment students are expected to make I’d like to see more transparency (league tables) as to what happened to previous students post graduation. I’d be very surprised if many of the students wanting to become game programmers completing courses that don’t require strong maths and physics don’t cover the basics like C++ end up getting interviews let alone jobs.
The new initiative in promoting game design, within the academic curriculum, is to be encouraged. However, in my experience the very separate disciplines of programming and design hold little respect for narative construction. The programmers delight in showing how far they can extend the boundaries of the interface; the designers concentrate on the 'look' of the piece. They both need to understand that a game's success succeeds or falls on its narrative construction. Yet, I see little mention of narrative construction to be included within the new courses - there is, however, a mass of references to visual effects. Unless 'visual effects' take the player somewhere along a logical and stimulating pathway, they are wasted.
Computer sciences has a very wide scope and video game design is a very small part of it but should be encouraged, from experience i think this subject should be taught from a much lower age as part of the national curriculum, which will give a pupil a much greater chance in succeeding at university and in finding a career of choice. The UK is has much talent in waiting in this field and competition is fierce but education+talent = skilled indiviuals with new ideas which will in turn lead to a greater future for the uk gaming industry.
