The chart below illustrates the relationship between these types, turbulence and an understanding of the subject area.

Commercial reasons for outsourcing are well known: improve efficiencies to increase revenue and market share; bring in external expertise; and allow managers to focus on core competencies. The same reasons apply to schools and colleges. Of particular importance to education is the freeing up of management time to focus on learning instead of managing ICT support services. This usually becomes painfully evident when there is a problem with those ICT support services. In my experience the problem is only acted upon when it hits crisis point—a mess.

Understand what’s going wrong

By the time things become a mess it is usually clear that the ICT has been dysfunctional for some time. Before looking into any solutions, such as outsourcing, understanding the reasons for the dysfunction is key. Furthermore, having a clear notion of what a well run ICT service looks like is also an important first stage regardless of potential methods for resolution.

Take steps to understand your current provision, how you got there and what effect it is having:

1. Audit current provision as an enabler of your wider strategic priorities for learning, teaching, welfare and inclusion.
2. Understand the impact the provision is currently having on learning, teaching, morale and innovation within your school or college. Talk to staff and students, formal lessons and informal learning and scrutinise work (staff and learners).
3. Understand how much your ICT costs: equipment, refresh, staffing and on-costs, licenses, subscriptions, insurances, power, security.

There are lots of sources of advice. A good place to start is Becta’s Self Review Framework.

Fix it by knowing what’s of value to you

Now start to think what you would expect if you were buying this service from a commercial provider. Look to other intuitions, case study examples and frameworks such as FITS to understand what is valued across the sector. Combining this research with the audit will give a more complete understanding of your starting point.

Align your starting point to wider goals

Check your self evaluations, talk to your SIP, LA or LSC and ensure that your priorities are aligned. Find out what strategic priorities are coming down the line from central and local government and hence what constraints (financial or technical) need to be considered.

You should now have a strong starting point that tells you what you value and establishes your ‘business case’. You should be able to articulate your vision for ICT at this stage which can be encapsulated in the form of an Output Specification—see examples from Partnerships for Schools.

Get rid of the mess

Now get rid of the mess. Your Output Specification should be good enough to go to tender. It should also be good enough to sit down with your in-house ICT managers and discuss what the needs of the school or college are over the next few years. And, crucially, what is expected with regard to service levels, metrics and accountabilities over that period.

Whether you outsource or not, you will be in a much stronger position to lead ICT from the front and will have defined ICT in educational rather than technical terms.

And here lay the problem. The network manager and a couple of skilled technicians were doing a sterling job keeping the system afloat. Probing deeper revealed that the decision to use so much open source software was down to underinvestment in ICT and not its quality or fitness for purpose. In an institution where the purse holders had not engaged in ICT, the technical team had compensated for the lack of cash by using free software and a lot of their own time in learning how to configure it. The true costs of maintaining and developing the ICT infrastructure remained hidden from managers and further risks introduced for future strategic decisions.

I am a big fan of open source software and use it daily on my own desktop and servers. I have seen it used effectively in many schools and colleges.

When senior leaders do not have a sound vision for ICT and where there has been prior underinvestment it is easy to see people chose to go open source:

• You do not have to repeatedly ask for money from someone who may be unsympathetic or unconvinced.
• There may be a community on the net that gives you a sense of belonging.
• You get to choose areas in which you can develop your own skills and knowledge.
• You get to a sense of personal pride from problem solving in a situation where you can cast yourself as the hero.

However, from an organisational perspective this can exacerbate some risks:

• The total cost of ownership remains unclear for senior managers and can become even more complex to calculate.
• Knowledge of how the system works can be held by one person and therefore dependent on their health, disposition and reliability.
• Senior managers may later take a strategic decision without knowledge of the system and its capabilities and costs. I have seen this cause a real and expensive organisational crisis many times.

Of course none of those risks are intrinsic to open source software; they arise from a lack of overall vision, poor strategic planning for ICT, and a lack of managerial and financial investment.

I think you need to be good to use open source software well in schools and colleges. Good in the sense that you need to know what you want to achieve from your ICT infrastructure, the impact you want it to have on improving outcomes, and have the confidence to invest fully in ICT. You also need to have good technical staff and a healthy, open relationship between senior managers and technicians.

Then the choice to deploy open source can then be made on the basis of its quality, suitability and support, just as would any other approach be it proprietary or managed services.

ICT is transforming the way teachers teach. Eighty per cent of teachers responding to our omnibus survey confirmed that using ICT in lessons made a difference to the way they teach. Two thirds of teachers felt that they have the skills to exploit the technology available to them.

However about a third say they need better, more reliable resources to use ICT more effectively.

Encouragingly, just under twothirds say it helps to raise pupil attainment.

It still looks nice but I have not found it ready for the big time. There are a lot of on-line wordprocessors around and being developed (see TechCrunch). It is worth keeping an eye on these projects to see if the move from the desktop to the Net is viable and likely to happen any time soon. It will also be interesting to see how the big players (Adobe, Google, Microsoft) aim to make money out of these.

What I really want is a decent wordprocessor that I can embed into a learning platform/ VLE and that does not lock me into any one file format (or uses ODT).  I want to be able to store the data somewhere else to separate the presentation and editing from the front-end.  I.e. I want to be able to build my learning platform from modules that fit together and I see productivity tools as part of that along with email, content etc. This would give me more choice and flexibility and ultimately more confidence in moving my documents from the hard-disk to the internet.

In a recent poll of parents, they discovered:

• 95% of parents think technology can help their children to learn,
• 78% think technology can bring lessons to life,
• but only 63% think it can improve exam results by making it easier to revise.

Odd that it can help learning but not too sure about exam success. However, on the plus side, parents would rather talk about technology with their kids than sex!

It has been very interesting reading comments in both the education press and blogs about the Asus. There seems to be a strong will among many for the ultimate, inexpensive, child-friendly portable gadget to come along. A super-gadget that will act as the front-end to the new mobile, 24/7 learning experience of the future. The eeePC does seem to be the closest thing we have at the moment. It certainly ticks a few boxes:

• it is cheap;
• it is very networkable in a range of media types (proper web-browser, web-cam, sound…);
• it has a good keyboard ;
• it has a good display the promise of higher resolutions coming along.

The eeePC also has a number of other qualities that make it attractive to many pushing this agenda forward. It runs using open-source software (Linux, Open-office) although a Windows XP version is coming soon. The inclusion of open source is great as it helps to keep the costs down and, generally, adheres to standard file formats and protocols.

The other thing of interest is the default installation. It is very geared up to what some have called the Google Operating System. I.e it has links straight through to Google docs, mail etc. Again, this aspect has attracted much comment as it can be cited as evidence that the world is moving away from large local software installations and more towards one of centralised services running on remote servers.

These two trends (open source/ standards and distributed services) are key aspects of what many ICT in education crystal-ball gazers have been saying is the way to go for sometime. It is therefore of great relief to see a device that embodies these trends and I am sure that this is responsible for much of the good-will being generated towards the eeePC.

However, the eeePC is just a small PC. There is nothing particularly special about it with regard to connectivity– in the hardware or software. (Incidentally, I installed Ubuntu on mine instead of the default OS and it works great.) But, the eeePC has been put together in a very easy to use way that just works out of the box. This is of much more value to most end-users than the fact it is open-source or has links to ‘Google bits and bobs’ from the desktop. I image that the inclusion of Open Office is also of much more value as I think we still have a way to go before people are producing all their written output on something like Google Docs.

Having said that, it’s a great device and it could be an important element of the learning platform initiative. I also hope that it’s success stimulates the market in this area. The more choice we have over affordable, well configured, non-propriety tools, the better it is for all.

There is hardly a book in sight.

Every student is issued a laptop and not much else to complete their studies. Homework projects are e-mailed to all the students, and their parents.

Every digital mark made on the board is downloadable to the family home.

There is another description about using video to improve achievement in ‘gym’.  What I find interesting, especially in comparison to the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme here in the UK, is the apparent scaling back of ambition. 

The examples given (an it is only one article) are not ‘transformative’ in the ways often described those driving ICT in BSF.  Rather, they are automating existing processes.

There is an accompanying interview with Bill Gates. In it he describes the future as being 5 to 10 years. A future in which every child has some sort of portable device (laptop/tablet), an online curriculum that is ‘customisable’ by the teacher (where’s the learner?), and an online portal for parents to see grades and attendance therefore being part of the loop. Again automating not transforming.

I think Microsoft/ Gates could be being very pragmatic here.  All of the things described are already being done and I know schools already doing it. However, they are not widespread and not necessarily being done well. Hence, they represent areas in which visible progress can be seen to be made soon. They are also things that pupils and parents seem to value in the present and short-term.

Further on in the clip, in the context of more disadvantaged children, Gates cites the network, the curriculum and teacher training as being harder nuts to crack than the provision of kit ($100 laptops etc). I.e, cultural aspects of the school: the environment/context in which the school exists; the stuff we think it is important to learn and how we measure it; and how the work-force engages with learning will be hardest part of any transformation.

I agree that having a shorter-term vision that consolidates what is best current practice as opposed to starting with a clean sheet of paper might be a more pragmatic way forward. I also think it is a way of minimising risk for private investors in state education.

However, we still need an eye on the longer term and we still need to look at what we need to do differently.  Especially as so many children are falling through the net. Automating the system could make us more efficient at failing some children.

I am looking forward to being independent and self-employed!

As I read it, I can’t help thinking about the whole-sale introduction of learning platforms (read VLE’s) in UK schools. I wonder if DfES/ BECTA hope this technology will disrupt current practice? I am not sure–not in the first round anyway. In Christensen’s eyes a couple of the characteristics of disruptive technologies are simplicity and low cost.  I am certain that for many schools it must seem like learning platforms are complex and expensive–in their procurement and deployment.

Christensen also describes a product life-cycle in which competition moves from features/performance through reliability, convenience and then, as the products provide more than the customers want, price. With the learning platform specification being defined centrally (the features), it will be interesting to see if this cycle occurs in a distorted way.

As ‘convenience’ assumes that the original features really are the ones required by the end-user, we might see an emerging picture where schools begin to use smaller, closely-coupled pieces of technology (including content and ePortfolios) assembled to meet their needs–i.e. they use the Internet as the learning platform.  Here the VLE would be a container for binding these services together and controlling access. This is a different picture to the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ scenario being painted at the moment.

Maybe, I’ll be wrong and the commercial suppliers will adapt their products as the market matures.  There are schools up and running with VLEs and many who are dissatisfied with their current choice. I can’t help feel at the moment that we are still looking to automate existing practice rather than do things differently. That vision needs to be more clearly defined and communicated to teachers.