Science exams are to be made easier to encourage more pupils to study, and so reverse the declining demand for the subject in schools. Well, they might as well do the same with computer studies and IT courses because they are clearly a waste of time.

What other conclusions can you draw from the continued fall in the number of technology GCSE and A-level exams being studied? Students are not interested in learning the subject. Universities do not bother to mandate computer A-levels as a pre-requisite for degrees in the subject. And according to the continuing letters from Computing readers, few employers are bothered about whether or not potential candidates have academic qualifications in IT at any level.

So are we on the verge of a time when IT employers will completely disregard the exam history of new entrants to the profession? Accountancy firms would never choose trainees without passing maths exams, no junior doctors would be allowed to avoid studying medicine, and no solicitor would make the grade without learning law. Personal attributes such as enthusiasm, aptitude and communication skills are vital criteria of course, but should IT as a recruiting profession be left to rely solely on these subjective judgements?

The sad fact is that IT employers are becoming increasingly divorced from the academic institutions that are meant to be preparing young people for a career in IT.

When A-level results were published earlier this month, the Department for Children, Schools and Families justified the drop in IT exams by telling Computing that ‘many young people interested in IT are taking alternative vocational routes rather than A-level.’ That just about says it all really – even the government aren’t bothered and expect pupils to find another way into IT rather than through A-levels, which one can only assume it tacitly acknowledges are not worth the screen they are printed from.

There will of course be exceptions – the technically-focused nature of many degree courses no doubt prepare interested graduates for careers in research or software programming. Just don’t mention that more and more firms outsource programming to India or elsewhere.

The most worrying aspect of this trend is that IT employers no longer seem to care about the inability of academia to prepare young people for a career in the profession. It is just accepted as a fact. Will the new IT Diploma make a difference? Let us hope so – but if the basic exam qualifications that every child goes through are so irrelevant to our industry, there is a more fundamental problem that surely has to be addressed.

What do you think?

I have realised that most senior executives from IT vendors are secret fans of former Boyzone lead-singer Ronan Keating. Or at least, they are fans of his song from the soundtrack to the movie Notting Hill. You know the one - when Keating croons in the chorus as Hugh Grant fumbles his way into Julia Roberts' heart: 'You say it best when you say nothing at all.'

For example, last week Computing was invited to take part in a breakfast roundtable interview with Oracle president Charles Philips - the man who effectively runs the software giant on a day-to-day basis, and is in charge when his boss Larry Ellison is away losing in the America's Cup. All the main UK IT publications were there as well, so there was never any chance of anyone coming away with an exclusive.
During about 45 minutes of detailed and fairly in-depth questioning, Philips said pretty much nothing - certainly nothing new or especially newsworthy. He is a very capable man, his CV is extraordinary, he has been one of the main driving forces behind Oracle's aggressive acquisition strategy of the past two or three years, he is bright, intelligent, personable. Like most of his peers in Silicon Valley and in major IT providers around the world, Philips has a huge amount of interesting things to say. So why doesn't he say them?

Don't get me wrong - this is not a personal criticism of him, I'm simply using the interview as a recent example of a pervasive reality in the IT industry. The top people at most major technology companies no longer publicly say anything of value. Much of this is down to share price paranoia - the effect of a word out of place on a company's stock market value has led them all to be so cautious about their public utterances that what does come out is bland, PR-approved, on-message marketing platitudes. To be honest, Charles Philips was probably more interesting than most, and we will use a few of his comments in a forthcoming feature, but I was left feeling there was a better story to be told that was never going to come out no matter how good the questions.

In Computing, we used to regularly feature exclusive interviews with vendor chief executives. These happen much less frequently now because the articles were just becoming too dull.  Some of them you could have written before the interview took place - so predictable were the interviewees' comments.

It is a shame. Our readers, the UK's IT decision-makers, deserve better- after all, they are the people who buy the products that earn these business leaders their multimillion-dollar bonuses. The supplier bosses are some of the world's most influential executives, they should let their personality, experience and opinions off the leash.

You say it worst, when you say nothing at all.

According to newspaper reports over the weekend, the BBC is considering bringing back Tomorrow's World, the seminal prime-time science and technology programme that was canned in 2003. I hope the stories are true.

This is not because I was a particularly big fan of the show - especially in the later years it became too much of a whizzy gadgets show, and a little too earnest for its own good - but its loss has been felt.

As I have written in this blog before, there is a direct correlation between the drop in student numbers for science and technology subjects and the lack of popular programming and role models for children in this field.

If Tomorrow's World achieved one thing, it demystified science and technology for a generation of children - myself included.  Where does a teenager go now to find out about these subjects in an easily accessible way? Just when we have a new generation who are more technology-literate than ever, the lack of role models means that interest is not being converted into enthusiastic students - and later into bright, creative, innovative IT professionals.

With issues such as climate change and energy supply likely to dominate the business and political agendas for many years to come, we need to be finding ways to de-geek the image of science and technology and make it a popular choice for students and young people entering the workforce.

Of course, the return of one TV show, even one with the history of Tomorrow's World, would not achieve this on its own, but it would be an important and visible step in the right direction.

UPDATE - The BBC has now said it has no plans to bring the programme back - see the full story here.

It's a bit too chicken and egg perhaps - science and technology is not popular enough to win the ratings war, but without high-profile science shows how will the subject become popular? Whatever happened to public service broadcasting? - but that's an entirely different debate.

I have learned things about Google. Secret things. But, as the cliche goes, if I told you, I might have to kill you. Because maybe, just maybe, Google would be out to get me otherwise. 

Last night was the Google summer press party and barbecue at Googleplex, the new London head office of the search firm's UK business. Computing is often invited to break bread and be force-fed beer by various IT companies at this time of year, and in the spirit of investigative journalism and our duty to hold the powerful to account, we accept the invitations.

But Google was different. On arrival at the office near Victoria train station, with wacky red telephone boxes and table football in the background in true dot com style, while collecting our name badges and lanyards, Google's kindly PR folk asked all the journalists to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before entering. This was, for a summer press party and barbecue, something of a first.

NDAs are things that PRs and IT companies sometimes use to prevent  journalists and analysts from publishing exclusive pre-briefed information provided in advance of a major event such as a product launch. I'm reliably informed that NDAs aren't worth the paper they are written on and would struggle to hold up in court, but nonetheless they act as a statement of intent, and breach of an NDA would at the very least lead to the offender being blacklisted from future privileged information.

Of course, at Google last night, there was little chance of anything confidential being revealed - although I suppose there may have been a clause saying we couldn't write anything uttered by drunken Google executives  that they shouldn't have said (not that they did, sadly). But privacy is, of course, very important to Google.

So I can only presume that I am not at liberty to reveal the secret of, erm, the recipe for the rather tasty barbecued herb chicken I enjoyed. (Apparently for Google's UK canteen - a vast space that is possibly the most costly eating place in London based on its real estate value - the company's Silicon Valley chefs were flown in to spruce up the menu of free staff food).

Nor can I reveal the generous range of sauces, vinegars and condiments provided to accompany the green salad. And the brands of beer we drunk must also remain confidential (although I can say that one was French and involved a date, and the other was Italian and is served by every pasta restaurant in the UK).

I did, however, learn about Google's impressive employee mentoring system - the company is recruiting so quickly that it appoints and trains existing staff to act as mentors to help new employees settle in. It's an admirable piece of HR. Although the downside, as far as I could see, was that mentors have to walk around in a bright red t-shirt with "Google Mentor" and a big white cross printed on their back, which is probably fine in the office, but perhaps less so on the Tube. Or perhaps I wasn't meant to tell you that either.

So, in the interests of Computing's relationship with Google, I'm afraid that the rest of the night's activities will also have to remain forever between us and them, bound under the strictures of non-disclosure.

But if you buy me a beer, and promise not to tell anyone that I told you...

There was a certain degree of personal satisfaction at Apple’s announcement last week that early sales of the iPhone have been a disappointment. As I wrote in this blog last month, I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about for a very expensive smartphone with limited functionality.

But perhaps I’m not the best person to judge.

My colleague Dave Friedlos wrote in the Newsdesk blog last week that he is a committed Facebook refusenik. So, in a similar spirit of confession…

* I don’t own a PDA or any form of handheld computer.

* My mobile phone is used almost exclusively for those very 20th century activities, talking to people and sending texts.

* My diary is made entirely of paper and card.

* And although I have a Facebook account, it is used rarely because my virtual friends are also actual, real-world friends whom I regularly contact by another quaint old technology, email.

Many of those friends are surprised to find that I am so un-enabled by IT. ‘But you’re the editor of a technology magazine,’ they say, on learning that my home is not filled with wireless routers.

Frankly, I’m not that interested. Technology for technology’s sake is a complete turn-off. But I can talk passionately about what technology can do to improve our lives. That is rarely what people expect to hear from anyone working in IT.

We need geeks – they are the lifeblood of any industry. But they are still the way we in IT are perceived, and that is wrong and unfair.

Is it any wonder that science and technology subjects have the biggest drop-out rates for university students? Or that the number of young people studying IT continues to fall? All they see is the perception of geeks – still.

Yet there is not one IT manager in the UK who gets away with taking a business case to the board armed with the justification that ‘this new computer is really whizzy and we must buy one’.

IT is about what it can do for your organisation – and only about that. Business technology exists for no other reason than to make companies moure competitive and profitable, and government better at delivering public services. It has no other purpose.

IT managers are the best evangelists for what technology can do, because they think on those terms. Let’s not lose the geeks, but the communicators must be the face of IT or one day UK IT will have no public face to display.