Code breakers return to Bletchley Park after 30 years

Their task – to break the Enigma code machine, a rotor cipher machine used by the German armed forces to send coded messages. At the outbreak of the war in 1939, the Germans changed the code cipher once a day, meaning that there were 159 million million million possible settings to choose from - daily.

The team of mathematicians stationed at Bletchley, which included one of the fathers of modern computing, Alan Turing, devised a machine that cracked the daily Enigma cipher. Historians have estimated that this breakthrough helped to shorten the war by two years, saving over 14 million lives.

After the war, some members of the Enigma code breaking team stayed at the site as part of the new Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). However, the site was decommissioned in 1987 after the GCHQ relocated to Cheltenham. And, there were plans to demolish the site in 1991, before these were quashed after the proposed plans sparked a backlash and a battle to keep the site’s wartime heritage alive.

Today Bletchley is open to the public as a museum and is visited by people from all over the world. However, the site is set to rekindle its code breaking past as plans have been announced for a new training college on the site to teach cyber security skills to 16-19 year olds.

The National College of Cybersecurity is set to open in 2018 and will be free to ‘gifted and talented’ students, selected through a variety of aptitude tests or on the basis of exceptional technology skills rather than academic qualifications. The syllabus will be drawn from individuals working at the forefront of the industry in the UK.

A burgeoning skills gap in UK engineering and dwindling numbers of young people studying STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects is leading to a growing concern over an engineering shortfall in the coming years.

This will be reflected in a dearth of cyber security skills, which is a concern due to the rising number of cyber attacks and the sophistication with which they are deployed.

The college will help to fill this gap, and will be housed in an old 1943 building on the Bletchley Park site, with a £5m restoration project already underway. The concept of the college was created by QUFARO – a new not-for-profit body created by experts working in cyber security including senior figures from Cyber Security Challenge UK, The National Museum of Computing, the Institute of Information Security Professionals, BT Security and Raytheon.

Margaret Sale, founding member of the National Museum of Computing, said setting up a college would help to “reactivate” the site as a “major active contributor to our national security.”