‘Codebreaker school’ planned for Bletchley Park
A National College of Cyber Security is being set up at the UK's World War II codebreaking centre, Bletchley Park. The boarding school for 16 to 19-year-olds is being created by not-for-profit organisation Qufaro, which is backed by top cybersecurity professionals, including the UK's Cyber Security Challenge and defence specialist Raytheon. Bletchley Park was the main site for British codebreakers during WWII, and is where the Nazis' Enigma code was decrypted. Margaret Sale, non-executive director of Qufaro and a founding member of Bletchley Park Trust, said the £5m restoration work would help preserve the historic site.

Its first operatives famously cracked coded messages encrypted by the Nazis, hastening the end of the second world war.

Now Bletchley Park is planning a new school for the next generation of codebreakers in order to plug a huge skills gap in what is fast emerging as the biggest security threat to 21st-century Britain.

The College of National Security, a first for the UK, is scheduled to open in 2018 in a specially adapted premises on the Bletchley Park site.

The sixth-form boarding school will be free to the 500-odd applicants, with a mix of venture capital, corporate sponsorship and very possibly state funding underwriting the multimillion-pound costs.

The school will teach cyber skills to some of the UK’s most gifted 16- to 19-year-olds. It will select on talent alone, looking in particular for exceptional problem solvers and logic fiends, regardless of wealth or family background, according to Alastair MacWillson, a driving force behind the initiative.

“The cyber threat is the real threat facing the UK, and the problem it’s causing the UK government and companies is growing exponentially,” said MacWillson, chair of Qufaro, a not-for-profit organisation created by a consortium of cybersecurity experts for the purposes of education.

Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, which is to be the site of the UK’s first cybersecurity sixth-form college. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

“There is a shortfall in terms of the professional resources to combat this right now and it will get so much worse unless there is a programme to get to grips with it,” MacWillson said, adding that a shortage of about 700,000 cybersecurity experts in Europe has meant that companies are struggling to get the right people.

The college will offer a curriculum that balances cybersecurity tuition – approximately 40% – with related subjects including maths, physics, and computer science over a three-year study period.

Beyond the boarding school option, there will be a selection of virtual short courses. Staffing and a detailed curriculum are still being thrashed out. Qufaro is discussing with the Department for Education whether state funding will apply. If it does not, the backup plan is to rely wholly on corporate sponsorship and money earned from other Qufaro initiatives.

Bletchley Park buildings that are being renovated. Photograph: Qufaro

The college will be boarding partly to ensure attendance by those who do not live in the south-east, but also, according to MacWillson, so individuals attending the college see themselves as a collective “inspired by their surroundings, and linked by a common goal”. One in 10 places will be offered to day students.

“It will be open to anybody providing that they can demonstrate the key talent – people who have natural ability to solve logic problems,” MacWillson said.

Cybercrime is growing at an unprecedented rate. According to the 2016 Internet Security Threat Report, spear-phishing campaigns targeting corporate and private data via seemingly innocuous emails have increased by 55% over the past year. The report also found that 75% of all legitimate websites have serious security flaws.

Richard Brunton, a cybersecurity expert at Burwell IT, thinks the college is an excellent initiative as the next generation is going to be key to cybersecurity. “The 16-year-olds are ideal, in that they have grown up in this technologically reliant world and perhaps are not held back by naivety of older generations who think a single firewall or a decent password is enough to secure their data.”

Capturing the interest of budding cybersecurity specialists is the main challenge. The school was launched because of the belief that there is a sizeable gap in cyber education from GCSE – where cyber forms part of the national computing curriculum – to degree level, where plenty of universities offer cybersecurity options.

However, Tim Stevens, a professor of war studies at King’s College London, questions whether the UK needs such an academy. “There’s already the promise of a new government-sponsored ‘virtual’ initiative mentioned in the new UK National Cyber Security Strategy, and this in addition to many degree courses, research groups and, of course, the sovereign capabilities of UK armed forces, intelligence, police and others,” he said.

For those involved with Bletchley Park, it is touching that part of the site is being reused for its original purpose. The museum will remain fully operational, but the two largest buildings on the site are being refurbished at a cost of more than £5m to house the school.

Margaret Sale, Qufaro’s non-executive director and founding member of the Bletchley Park Trust and the National Museum of Computing, says: “Through initiatives such as the national college, we can effectively combine the principles of heritage, education and innovation for which everything on this site stands. Previous generations are deeply proud of their contributions at Bletchley Park. I am keen to see what the next cadre will achieve.”