Co-producing a strong future for Cyberfirst Wales
The challenge
CyberFirst Wales, a partnership between the National Cyber Security Centre, University of South Wales, Swansea University, and Coleg Cambria, had successfully delivered cyber and tech education programmes to schools and FE colleges across Wales. The programme currently includes cyber awards, industry partnerships, and ambassador role modelling. With possible changes being planned to the programme’s funding and objectives they wanted to engage stakeholders, including teachers, industry partners, young people, and third sector organisations to co-design the new approach.
The approach
Co-production Lab Wales provided multiple engagement opportunities including:
- Mix of in person and online follow up sessions with industry and education leads to explore key themes from creative mapping and facilitate discussions to identify challenges and ideas for expansion.
- Creative co-production space at a large event: utilising a planned engagement event, we ran a creative mapping exercise that allowed story boarding with young people, questionnaire and 1:1 discussion with industry and teachers leads.
The outcome
Cyberfirst Wales were able to bring together around 100 participants, across industry, education and young people, to reflect on what is working well, what needs to grow, and what young people in Wales need from the expanded TechFirst Wales programme. You can read more about the project here.
Feedback
“The needs were met above our expectations. It was important for us to get an unbiased and objective view of what’s happened and what is needed in the future. The outcomes clarified some of our assumptions but also highlighted a few things that were new to us.”
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