The director of Oracle’s education academy has welcomed the Government’s proposed new IT curriculum, after seeing an outline of it.

Jane Richardson says Oracle will wait for the formal release of the curriculum – which is due to be rolled out in 2014 – to find places where they believe their own educational material could support it.

She said: "The UK is now beginning to recognise there’s a bigger picture here in terms of economic development and making sure SMEs have the right skills in years to come.

"That talent pool is increasingly including high level computing science skills or business application skills.

"We’re very supportive of the fact that the Government’s putting computing at the core of its IT curriculum, which has tended to be around spreadsheets and PowerPoint."

Oracle Academy has been in operation since 1993 and provides computing science education for primary school children and upwards, as well as university and college-level materials.

"For the school space we develop our own curriculum around global generic technology skills like Java, database design and development and SQL," said Richardson.

And she does not believe companies – Google, Cisco, and Microsoft are also trying to develop children’s IT skills – getting involved in education is a bad thing.

"The skills we’re teaching children, they’re not specific to Oracle," she said. "It’s all about teaching students about important stuff in a way they don’t know they’re learning it."

As an example, she points to a lesson in which pupils build their own animations, without necessarily realising they are learning about coding as they make the animations move.

And it has proved a particular hit with girls, added Richardson, in whom the Government is eager to spark an interest for IT.

"We’ve had very positive feedback particularly from teachers who say this is engaging for girls," she said. "There’s a bigger picture of trying to encourage more of them into IT."

Their free software is available for teachers, too, and Richardson said free courses to teach them more about computing science before they start teaching the classes are proving wildly popular, with 170 London teachers signing up to one last year, meaning 70 they could not fit in will go on another imminent course.

Richardson is confident the new curriculum, and educational software such as Oracle’s can help cut the skills gap.

She said: "If we can build up children’s IT skills from the age of eight upwards, what a huge difference that will make to the world’s economies.

"India and China, they have such a large output of computer science graduates and India itself has now created its own industry."