Livingstone-Hope Skills Review recommends major changes to UK video games and visual effects education

The Livingstone-Hope Skills Review released today, and backed by NESTA and Skillset has claimed that the UK games business has the potential to generate £1 billion more sales by 2014, but that for this to happen, major changes need to be made to the current educational system.

The report looked at both the video games and visual effects industries, and their relation to STEM education in schools; identifying the fact that “there are severe misalignments between the education system and what the UK video games and visual effects industries need”. In carrying out the survey, the authors surveyed a huge number of parents, young people and teachers to gauge their views on the skills and subjects required to work in these two industries, principally, “a lack of understanding of the importance of maths, physics and art” was identified among them.

In-depth interviews were also undertaken with over half of the UK’s video games and visual effects industries employers, and many of them revealed “a real dissatisfaction with the talent pool available in the UK”, meaning they are often forced to recruit from overseas instead.

More worryingly, although the report specifically focussed on two industries: video games and visual effects, the findings showed that the deficiencies of the educational system uncovered through this investigation could actually have much wider ramifications upon the UK’s entire “high-tech creative and digital industries more generally”.

The report made 20 recommendations across the talent pipeline, ranging across 1) Schools, 2) Universities, Colleges and Vocational education, and 3) Training and continuous professional development. A few of these recommendations included:

The report concludes by saying that: “Unless we act quickly, we are in danger of losing out in globally competitive markets that are only set to grow quickly in the years ahead”.

The full report Next Gen - Transforming the UK into the world’s leading talent hub for the video games and visual effects industries can be downloaded from this page.