“In life you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate” Don King, 1992
Why start a building schools blog off with a quote from a boxing promoter? Bear with me, this one refers to scams and sharp practice, and the filthiest and most colourful sport seems a good place to start. Boxing is full of calculating and clever individuals, who often bend and break rules with impunity – only two people have been convicted of fixing boxing bouts in the last 50 years – that’s the same number as for cricket. Nowadays schools, especially autonomous ones, have a large number of relationships with suppliers. Unlike with supply chains and the construction industry these relationships can be anything but cosy, and the potential pitfalls of using a bad operator were highlighted at the start of the year by this story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16441186 All credit to Glemsford Primary School for fronting up about this situation, it takes a lot of bravery to admit to being fleeced like this. Needless to say, this wouldn’t have happened if the schools affected had picked a firm from a BECTA framework (many are still in effect even though the organisation is no more). When BECTA was dissolved tributes didn’t exactly flood in – it’s easy to critique the framework method, it favours big firms and can create cartels. Honest SMEs, unlike the one mentioned in the above article, now have a much better chance of supplying to schools, which is a good thing. Are the safeguards against bad operators sufficient, however? Primary schools especially are vulnerable on the ICT front, with fewer dedicated ICT staff and teachers that are ill-equipped to negotiate good supply deals. Many of BECTA’s responsibilities are being taken in-house by the DfE and a new set of frameworks is being implemented by the dept. – most of the firms on it will be familiar to ICT managers, at the very least let’s hope this restores order and honesty to the marketplace. The intensive use of ICT throws up challenges for schools and for design and build teams. When embarking on a newbuild or a major refurb getting the ICT provision exactly right is difficult, requiring a lot of expertise and foresight. Step one, the widespread use of ICT needs to written into the building services spec of the project plan. Step two, the classroom environment needs to be designed in such a way to anticipate technological changes over the operational life of the building. Anyone know what ICT we’ll be using in 10, 20 or 50 years time? No? Me neither. Having that level of foresight is just impossible, I suppose the best you can hope for is to enable a building for the use of today’s technology, and make spaces flexible enough so they can be adapted to unforeseeable changes in 10 – 15 years time. Beyond getting the building design right, there are questions about the optimum use of ICT – you need to consider that major spends on buying ICT hardware and software, then operating machines take away from the rest of your budget. What are you achieving with ICT exactly? Evidence that ICT use alone boosts attainment in schools is scant – so this is highly debatable. One thing that isn’t debatable is that the ICT-rich environment in Britain’s schools hasn’t led on to a number of tech champions in the real world. There’s no British equivalent of Google, IBM, CISCO, Dell, Apple, Acer, or Microsoft. Perhaps the mooted changes to the ICT curriculum will address this. The previous government tried hard to effect a transformational change and yet ICT in schools is seen as being boring and basic. We simply won’t compete with China and India if all we have is Generation Y kids being particularly adept at doing a mail merge. ICT in certain schools is so ubiquitous that wifi points exist in PE changing rooms – not exactly the best place to learn how to do C++ or Javascript coding. So what do we need going forward? A better curriculum – let’s hope that’s now being taken care of. Better ICT enabled classrooms – still a problem and one that the DfE Technology Policy Unit needs to get to grips with. And lastly the efficient use of ICT in schools – no dogmatic splurge, schools should be smart and well-informed about what their needs should be and should not overuse ICT. Getting the right spec and using hardware the right amount should free up money which is vital in the current funding environment.
