Following the highly acclaimed film The Imitation Game which features the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing's journey to cracking the Nazi's "unbreakable" Enigma, Bletchley Park, where Turing made the breakthrough, will now host UK's first ever National College of Cyber Security.
Since Turing and his team's decoding of the Enigma, considered as the "single biggest contribution to Allied victory" and has been critical in cutting short the Second World War by two years, Bletchley Park has thus been named the "Home of the Enigma Codebreakers."
The building of the cyber security college is currently being managed by QUFARO, a newly created cyber defense government agency. The agency says the college will open in 2018, and as of now focus is on restoring the Bletchley Park site which is costing the UK $6.2 billion.
Entry will be highly competitive and only the brightest in the country are given the opportunity to "follow in Alan Turing's footsteps" as a QUFARO spokesperson says.
QUFARO Chair Alastair MacWilson says that the UK is lagging behind in cyber security innovation, and this project wishes to address that need. He adds, "Our cyber education and innovation landscape is complex, disconnected and incomplete putting us at risk of losing a whole generation of critical talent."
He encourages youngsters interested in forging a career in cyber security to take the challenge. He says cyber security will never be unilineal; for it to be effective, it should have in place expertise from different fields but with the same goal at hand. The problem with current available curricula in cyber security is, he adds, "filled with excellent but disparate initiatives-each playing a vital role without offering a truly unified ecosystem of learning and support."
This is why the college will be offering a variety of subjects that include high level maths, computer science and physics.
Courses offered on-site will be for new university students; however, online courses will also be available for second degree holders.
Students accepted on-site will be housed in the boarding school for free, with programs open to highly talented 16-19 year olds from all backgrounds. QUFARO assures that there will be a good mix of females and males, with females taking up at least one third of the whole batch.
MacWilson says the ultimate task is to bridge the gaps between current systems, and to contribute to society in the best ways possible. This way, the college can produce "the next generation of codebreakers and security experts."
