School for teenage codebreakers to open in Bletchley Park

Its first operatives famously cracked coded messages encrypted by the Nazis, hastening the end of the second world war. Now Bletchley Park is planning a new school for the next generation of codebreakers in order to plug a huge skills gap in what is fast emerging as the biggest security threat to 21st-century Britain. The College of National Security, a first for the UK, is scheduled to open in 2018 in a specially adapted premises on the Bletchley Park site. The sixth-form boarding school will be free to the 500-odd applicants, with a mix of venture capital, corporate sponsorship and very possibly state funding underwriting the multimillion-pound costs. The school will teach cyber skills to some of the UK's most gifted 16- to 19-year-olds.