Becta should not have been scrapped, say teachers, IT professionals and analysts

Decision to abolish IT procurement body is now being criticised from all sides

Over the past week, teachers, analysts, IT professionals and government bodies have all said, independently, that the government's decision to scrap education IT procurement body Becta was a mistake.

Speaking at a recent roundtable hosted by Netgear, attendees with an interest in educational IT procurement lamented the body's abolition.

"Schools need guidance from people who understand IT and its role in education rather than teachers who have been drafted into the council to fill that role," said Duncan Fitz-Gibbons, governor at a Cheshire primary school and founder and owner of One And All, an SMB-orientated IT services organisation.

"In the primary school education sector there's been very little support and guidance; the quality of some of the software that they're buying is low, the price is too high, but nobody knows any better."

Jon Collins, independent IT analyst and parent governor at Cirencester Deer Park School, said: "Becta used to advise on issues like this but now the organisation has been canned."

And according to Margaret Coleman, who runs her own independent consultancy in management and strategy for post-sixteen education and the third sector, there is a need for IT standardisation in the education sector, which Becta would have been instrumental in supporting.

"I think you need industry standards for hardware and software. For example, schools and colleges should have benchmarks. A benchmark with a learner entitlement, which gives you entitlement to industry standard software plus a renewal on a specific brand of computer, wouldn't that be great? But at the moment, in schools, the person being given this responsibility for procurement is usually the headteacher, who has no formal IT training."

Their views were supported by a report published by the Public Administration Select Committee which includes statements from witnesses giving evidence to the enquiry on the abolishment of government quangos. In the report, one official says that the abolition of the ICT education agency seems to have been based on "no evidence whatsoever".

In his introduction to the report, committee chairman and Conservative MP Nicholas Jenkin also declared that the process had been "botched".