Solihull Council has become the first local authority in England to sign an IT contract under the government’s £45bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

Under the terms of the £6.4m, five-year, managed services contract, elearning specialist RM will provide schools in the borough with support for existing IT facilities and will work together with the council to rebuild and refurbish the systems.

David Butt, information strategy manager for children’s education at Solihull Council, says the contract will include the creation of an online managed learning environment that will offer learning materials and allow pupils to submit homework via the web.

‘It will enable courses of work to be put online,’ he said.

‘Young people will be able to do their homework on it and then send it back to their teacher, who can then mark it on the system and feed the assessment data into records to keep track of each child’s progress electronically.’

The BSF programme is the Department for Education and Skills’ 15-year plan to modernise every secondary school in the country to provide high-quality facilities, which help to meet the needs of every child.

Much of the BSF money will be spent on new schools and upgrading existing ones. There is also a large provision for improving schools’ IT facilities.

Solihull wanted to put the IT contract in place before negotiating for new school buildings for the borough, says Butt.

‘Most councils are negotiating their buildings and IT contracts in parallel,’ he said.

‘However, we pushed this elearning deal through very aggressively because we wanted to have the IT contract in place while we were still at preferred bidder stage on the buildings side, so that we could ensure the complete integration of the systems into the new facilities.’