Last week a team from UWEcyber attended the NCSC Education Ecosystem annual conference in Leeds. Ian Johnson (AHOD Cyber Security) and Phil Legg (Professor of Cyber Security) were present as co-directors of the UWEcyber Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE), alongside Aida Abzhaparova (Master of conferences in cybersecurity and globalization). Politics) and Alan Mills (cybersecurity professor), who both led outreach projects through ACE-CSE this year. Phil Legg also presented an interactive session at the conference with his external colleagues from the University of Abertay and the University of Roehampton as part of his continued leadership within the CISSEUK initiative to strengthen collaboration between academia, industry and government and improve connectivity of the education pipeline to cybersecurity.
Alan Mills presented the ACE-CSE project for the development of teachers in schools in the region. This year we have expanded our teacher training initiative to cover six workshops across two sites (UWE Bristol and Gloucestershire College, Cheltenham), to reach a more varied and diverse mix of educators across the South West region . The workshops were specifically structured around three themes: cybersecurity for young people (for students in grades 7 to 9), cybersecurity basics (for students in grades 9 to 11), and careers and apprenticeships in Cybersecurity (for students in grades 11-13). The project has proven to be a success, with excellent feedback from participating teachers and a number of follow-up collaborations already underway. We continue to work closely with area schools to help students and teachers develop their cybersecurity knowledge and expertise.
Aida Abzhaparova then presented the ACE-CSE project for the development of SMEs in the region. This was a collaborative project between the UWE Cybersecurity team and the DRAGoN team who focus on issues of data governance and privacy – bringing these two core areas of UWE together to organize combined workshops. Over the course of two workshops, we helped over 17 SMEs better understand cybersecurity issues and how they relate to their specific organization, from construction to accounting to circus skills. The diversity of organizations that chose to participate was fantastic to see! We also helped introduce SMEs to the “Five Safes” model developed by DRAGoN as an appropriate way to think about access and use of sensitive data within their organization.
The conference brings together academia, industry and government, including the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, Department for Education, NCSC and GCHQ, and the UK Cyber Security Council and other major UK cybersecurity stakeholders.