28 Aug 2008
IT spending in schools is forecast to hit £1.29bn per year by 2012 as the government’s £45bn schools revamp gathers pace, raising the profile of IT in education.
Schools will spend £1.05bn on IT in 2008-2009, but the £4.5bn earmarked for IT under Building Schools for the Future (BSF) will help drive annual growth of 5.3 per cent over three years, according to research by Kable.
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The part IT plays in the schools transformation programme is actually greater than its share of the budget, according to Steve Moss, strategic director for IT at Partnerships for Schools (PfS), the public body responsible for BSF.
“Because 10 per cent of BSF is IT money and the programme has been running for a few years now, a lot more money is being spent on IT in education than before it started,” he said.
“IT punches above its weight in terms of its transformational impact, and it is the innovative IT environments and equipment that are almost as likely as the buildings to have that impact.”
BSF provides IT funding equivalent to £1,675 per pupil place in each new or remodelled school to cover network infrastructure and equipment, hardware, software and managed services.
PfS expects 35 schools to open between 2008 and 2009, followed by 115 in 2009-2010, 165 in 2010-2011 and 200 for each subsequent year of the programme, which could run for up to 20 years.
“Schools develop an output specification and the ICT partner proposes solutions that match the school’s strategy for change,” said Anne Casey, education IT adviser at PfS.
“They have a shared learning platform that supports the Every Child Matters agenda and are looking at how adaptive and enabling technologies can support all learners.
The BSF process means that there is a wide variety of solutions matched to need. Each local authority will have certain unique and distinct features and the ICT will reflect this.”
Re your article entitled "BSF schools to spend £1.29bn on IT by 2012" dated 28th August 2008 it read that PfS is celebrating a transformational success. This is not the feedback being heard about our local authority IT managed service. Far from it! We hear that a £7.5m first payment is being withheld from the IT partner for non-performance; that some of the PFIs which joined the IT managed service are not being supported in favour of the BSFs; ICT technical support staff based in these schools are using words such as "shambles" to describe the arrangements. One school was asked if the sixth form could be trained during summer and cascade the training to staff as the provider had not planned sufficient provision to role out essential training.
As for increased expenditure sounding like development, quite the reverse. Of course schools will spend more. Why? Well first because some BSF schools have not been allowed to take 8-month old computers with 28 months of warranty remaining on them into their new schools. Can PfS explain how scrapping nearly new kit is good for the tax payer or indeed the environment?
Secondly there is documentation agreed by our Authority advising schools it is compulsory to spend a minimum of 25% of ICT grants on "refresh" which means in some cases it is compulsory to spend £0.5 million in 3 - 4 years on kit in some cases for schools that were not built with the suitable infrastructure to support the technology. By that I mean ventilation for the added heat plus first and second fix installations. Presumably if you are refreshing that amount it means you had to buy that at the time of contract inception.
Do schools realise that managed service contract will cost them about three times their normal IT staffing bill? Do they realise that the providers sell their own kit with unique pieces of architecture so that you can only buy power supplies etc from that company? That despite paying through the nose for a managed service which included staff, the shelf price of equipment still has a cost of un-boxing it and setting it up in the classroom added on? Isn't that paying twice? Does the government not care that they will bleed tax payers dry as they line the pockets of private companies? Is that what transformational education is about? There's a crisis coming make no mistake.
Anonymous
Posted by: Bursar - do not use my ID on this item 11 Sep 2008
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