Blair sees class act

Scottish schoolchildren demonstrated a #5million investment on 3,000 web-connected PCs and video-conferencing facilities to Tony Blair last week, writes Dan Sabbagh.

It was the first public display of West Lothian Council?s initiative to provide PCs for the community. Each secondary school is stocked with 200 PCs, Sun Microsystems web servers and a video conference facility, which was used to link up with Blair elsewhere in Scotland.

Richard Pietrasik, a head teacher who is project manager for the initiative, said the investment meant West Lothian had the most advanced schools IT in Europe. ?Now students can use video-conferencing to hold lessons with kids abroad, for example.?

Underpinning the initiative is a virtual private ISDN network supplied by BT. It was chosen after TeleWest failed to deliver a higher bandwidth cable modem network. ?TeleWest stopped rolling out its local network, and in any case we were not sure if its cable modem technology would work,? said Pietrasik.

Access to the Internet is regulated by software from I-gear, which blocks forbidden web sites and inappropriate language.

The project, dubbed Creatis, began in April 1997, and came to fruition at the start of the new academic year.

The project is the latest example of a council showing its support for the government?s national grid for learning scheme.