New codebreakers school at Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park will once again be home to codebreakers after it was announced as the location of the new National College of Cyber Security.

The Buckinghamshire estate (pictured), where Alan Turing and others broke the Nazis’ Enigma code during World War Two, will receive a £5 million renovation to convert it into a state-ofthe-art security training facility.

Run by Qufaro, a consortium of security experts and industry figures, the college will be open to around 500 16-to-19 year-olds, 90 per cent of whom will be boarders.

Students will be selected not on specific academic qualifications, but through aptitude tests, or by demonstrating exceptional technology skills. There will be no fee for attending.

The chair of Qufaro, Alastair Macwillson, said that the college will help to plug a growing skills gap in the UK: “Our cyber education and innovation landscape is complex, disconnected and incomplete, putting us at risk of losing a whole generation of critical talent”.

A spokesperson for the GCHQ intelligence agency welcomed the news, saying that the college could “provide a pathway for talented students from schools that are not able to provide the support they need”.

Around 40 per cent of the college’s curriculum will be devoted to cybersecurity, with the rest of the time split between complementary subjects such as maths, physics, economics and computer science.