School IT quango to be expelled Becta, the education IT procurement quango, is to be scrapped as part of the new government's £6.2bn cuts this year, announced by George Osborne this morning. Schools are expected to get more control over their technology purchases as a result. Becta did not buy computers and software for schools, but instead drew up framework …
I work with dyslexic students and they are given laptops funded by the Disabled Students Allowance and they often cost more than if you just sent the student down to PC World.
Without Becta, I'd estimate that there'll be about £300-£500 of funding per student that can be used for tuition and support which is far more useful.
to arrange vendor contracts and advise on desktop specs & software packages? GTFO. I knew quangos take the p*ss but that's just insulting.
It should be like 3 qualified IT guys (server, network & software) in an office with a budget of £200k p.a. for the lot (pay, office rental etc.).
Looking at how government departments spend I doubt that BECTA was actually saving money.
Example of government savings - spending £4.41 to £10.55 for a pack of 12 post-it notes. Price if bought by the man in the street from a normal stationers? £1.75
And as Squirrel says, £112m to basically write up contracts and negotiate "discounts". They haven't bought anything for the schools. If anything they lock the schools into contracts which are negotiated nationally and not for individual school's needs.
One example of many quangos where people will lose there job and where I will cheer as it means my taxes aren't paying their wages. Yes I will be paying their dole money, but they will be able to get a job in some private company soon enough - unless they were so crap at their job that they are effectively unemployable (most likely situation).
...the risk assesment to cross the road to visit the man on the street?
My other half is a teacher, they have quite a lot of technology in the school and not a bloody clue how to use it.
The things a teacher could do with an interactive whiteboard to engage the children are limitless. 99% of them using it as nothing more than a traditional whiteboard. What's the point?
More money spent on training teachers to get jiggy with the kit please
So many schools are using Microsoft Office, lets hope that we will see Open Office, Firefox, Linux, Thunderbird etc..
The schools should have a £Nil budget for Office software, Browsers, etc.. although I accept that a few devices should run on Windows, maybe not more than 25%.
NJSS
Open Office - Don't like it myself but fair enough
Firefox - Not really a "mature" browser in terms of 'enterprise' manageability, patching, etc.
Linux - Has its place, like any other platform. We run a mix of that, Windows and Mac OSX depending on our needs for a particular job, and I have no plans to change that to meet the ideals of some open source zealots.
Thunderbird - See comments on Firefox.
The amount we pay for MS Office at my college is negligible in the great scheme of things - the cost of changing would more than offset the licence savings.
As for a "£nil budget for office software, browsers, etc", even if the list price of something is zero, you don't seriously thing it costs nothing to install and support it?
"To replace MS Office, the compatibility has to be virtually seamless. "
No it doesn't.
It's a school. Start the new first year kids on Open Office and by the time they leave school everyone will be using it.
Kids don't like using OO? Tough Faecal Matter. Kid's don't like homework or exams or learning in general. In fact, if there is any way to make OO harder to use for children then you can be damn sure I approve.
It's time to learn that every kid is not gifted and many of them aren't even moderately intelligent. These are people who need to be forced to use their brains more not less.
They don't need anything even remotely compatible with microsoft office!
The first word proecessor i used at school was Folio, then some random office suite on an Acorn, something on Amiga, then Lotus Wordpro, then Microsoft Office. By that time I actually knew how to use a word processor, not just how to use Word.
Schoolchildren should be taught principles, not specific applications! That way they can adapt to any word processor, any spreadsheet etc. Even in my final year of school though, i was forced to do some standard IT course, despite being in the final year of Information Systems. It was very much load up Word, click this menu, click this button, etc. Great for producing armies of button clickers with no knowledge of what they are actually doing or why!
With IE & Office, all patches can be managed centrally using WSUS (look it up). You then get reports on any users who aren't fully up to date. With firefox, you just don't get that manageability.
And, Yes, I am using Firefox, but wouldn't expect any of my corporate customers to do the same.
We don't need WSUS or anything like it on LInux. It can run from a single system image. Linux can run either as a disk-less workstation with the one system image on a server, or with a hard disk acting as a cache of the server's master.
Either way, update the master, and the workstations look after themselves.
You can't do this with MS Windoze, because every instance of Windoze insists of writing to itself and making itself different to any other instance. This makes it somewhat harder to make unauthorized copies: a benefit to Microsoft, a large dis-benefit to end-users.
"Office ....costs about £4 per license for schools. More money is spent on post-it-notes"
So?
You public sector folks have a really strange way of dealing with money, i.e. it's okay to waste money as long as it's not your greatest expense.
Snake oil salesman: Would you like to buy my magic oil?
School: How much is it?
Snake oil salesman: Less than you spend on post-it notes mate
School: I'll take it!
but in practice open source software is a nightmare. I can happily use GPO's to lock down I.E., force proxies, bolt down what you can and cant do in office, change templates, globals and mailbox locations at a whim. I can also use outlook calendars, tasks, export from our MIS straight into peoples outlook.
I can do precisely none of this in open office, thunderbird, zimbra etc. so sure, I pay £27 per desktop to licence office, windows 7 (well it will be windows 7 this summer) and all the relevent CALs necessary. WSUS handles all of my updates, I click sync, assign updates to the groups and off they go.
Firefox would need a new package creating, ORCA the beast, roll it out and hope it works. IEAK for IE8 was a dream to work with. Office admin kit was fantastic at creating installation template.
The only open source I use is squid and dansguardian. The rest is good on paper but an admin nightmare. Obviously if you have more than 2 staff for 500 PCs then im sure you can work with doing things manually. I dont have that luxury.
... to the quango, but they make damn sure the school pays more than that.
As referred to by a previous poster, the enforced purchase process and enforced suppliers (the company paying the biggest back-hander?) costs the schools thousands un-necessarily in hardware software and support costs. My daughter's school could employ a full time IT support person and give them a moderate budget for what they pay for the half-baked service they receive at present.
Use Linux/OO/Firefox? - Yes, I am one of those zealots, but still think that school students are better off learning about Windows and Mac environments too.
Just stop the rip-off. Good move ditching that bunch of wasters... Lets see more of this type of thing... CSA? Child Tax Credits anyone?...
... I've had the misfortune to work with Becta before and yes they are a complete waste of space, when I was working in FE you get used to the slackers that freeload their way to a paycheck with minimal effort but Becta seemed like a whole organisation built to do just that.
The Article I mean, not just Becta
1. This is last weeks news and appeared again on Saturday morning BBC radio.
2. Becta's role was always advisory. Schools and local authorities have always been at liberty to ignore Becta guidance and Becta frameworks and by god they do, daily.
3. Nulabour did not create Becta in 1998 it merely re-badged NCET which was the direct descendant of MESU. I'll sell you a history lesson if you like.
It is not the demise of Becta which is going to hit schools. It is the end of the £ 200 million per annum Harnessing Technology grant worth something of the order of £ 10 k per school per annum, which is not a lot of money, but it is a very sizeable chunk of what schools have left when they have paid the rent and the pfi profits guarantee and put a few warm bodies in front of classes.
Watch out for schools that stop paying their maintenance and support contracts, for kit and IWBs that the schools cannot afford to replace and repair. Watch the return of blackboard and chalk.
Watch out also for those smart-arsed local authorities which have ignored the Becta advice and diverted the Harnessing Technology funds to low-cost copper connections with high revenue costs rather than investing in fibre which historically had high set up costs but is subsequently cheap to run. Their schools could find themselves paying more for less without the specific grant to do it.
Capita share are down 2% on the Chancellor's speech. Short RM.
>Watch out for schools that stop paying their maintenance and support contracts, for kit and IWBs that the schools cannot afford to replace and repair. Watch the return of blackboard and chalk.
I pay good money to send my kids to a school that does just that. Available kit, technology and infrastructure is absolutely irrelevant to education. I'd rather have competant teachers with a knowledge and love of their subject using blackboards than any amount of kit delivering a fast-food curriculum.
If you can point me at studies which show IWB impact positively on learning, real control studies not half-arsed 'action research' please do - but I'll take my chances with small classes using face-to-face delivery by teachers who understand and write their own syllabi - and the complete absence of 'out of the box' teaching materials and LPs. I see that working every day.
I appreciate the problem you're highlighting though - I wonder how many teachers could actually deliver their subject well using chalk and talk these days.
I know you lot who commented so far are hard of learning, but cum'on even you must be able to see this is one of many new epic fails that this crazy alliance is about to plonk on us tax payers.
Whilst you can just nip up to PCWorld and buy a computer for a little less than this outfit could advise, what you hard of learning lot are missing is the future support fit for purpose work they did and all those things you lot dont seem to understand as you clearly have never worked in an organisation that gives'a.
Now we will have the chaos again that once rushed through our schools in some of the early days of computing with schools. We also now have School IT staff doing MORE paper work and research into computers, best prices and so on. Add to this the risks increase of a school getting scammed by some 'retailer' who takes the money and never delivers due to being on the beach in Bali drinking the ill gotten gains.
This is one of the many EPIC fails we are about to see in the coming year (before they bitch and fight and we have a new election).
"We also now have School IT staff doing MORE paper work and research into computers, best prices and so on"
What else are they supposed to be doing?
Do you mean IT teachers? If they don't know enough to specify the equipment they need and lack the savvy to negotiate a deal with suppliers then I'd say they are in the wrong job.
"We also now have School IT staff doing MORE paper work and research into computers, best prices and so on."
Or as we like to call it, "Doing our job".
" Add to this the risks increase of a school getting scammed by some 'retailer' who takes the money and never delivers due to being on the beach in Bali drinking the ill gotten gains."
I think the chances of my employer getting scammed like this are about on a par with your chances of posting a useful contribution to this thread.
I mean, 'Durr, thick move'. Are you getting your insults from 4 year olds?
My wife is the ICT coordinator at her school, and is very glad to see the back of BECTA. The 'advice' they give, the nonsense ICT Mark they encourage you to spend money to get, and the non-existent discounts they allege to have achieved are worthless.
The PCs they recommend are just no good for the type of multimedia work (primary) schools do. A basic 'office' PC will not suffice. So, my wife has a schedule for machine replacement that she can budget against. Three types of PC: computer lap, classroom and staff laptops. Each PC within a type is of a standard build. They're a bargain from whichever reseller is cheapest. As for support -- with the money saved from BECTA's recommendations, she can buy 2-3 extra PCs to use as swap in replacements. More complex stuff (and any tricky server admin) is done by a small local support firm. Which benefits everyone in the community, not Dell or similar.
Yes there's a bit of extra paperwork; but with proper planning it's only every 2-3 years (the PC 3 types are on a different replacement cycle). She isn't scammed because she knows what she's doing, and the support is from a local supplier (and her school isn't in Bali) who are unlikely to scam her because it'll hurt them in the longer term. They give a shit about her business. Would Dell/HP/whomever?
As for open source, well they use OO on Windows. Linux (for now) is a step too far.
I'm clearly hard of learning but by using a few well chosen resellers that are happy to bend over backwards to ensure they continue getting a decent chunk of my budget I regularly buy kit well below retail and I have a contact list full of account managers who are keen to do all the legwork in checking out specs 'n prices to offer me the best deals. There are a couple of resellers in particular I tend to go to for large/important orders as I know their after sales service is also excellent.
Of course, I'm sure it would be better to leave the hard of learning camp to join the hard of thinking brigade and just buy whatever becta tell me to.
"Whilst you can just nip up to PCWorld and buy a computer for a little less than this outfit could advise, what you hard of learning lot are missing is the future support fit for purpose work they did and all those things you lot dont seem to understand as you clearly have never worked in an organisation that gives'a."
What 'future support'? The HE students I work with don't get any support from BECTA. They just get given a laptop that costs about £200 or so more than the same laptop from PC World.
That money comes out of the same Disabled Student Allowance pool that is supposed to pay for tuition and support. The more the hardware costs, the less there is to pay for useful things.
NHS supplies. All PCT's are legally required to stuff from them. They are rip off merchants of the highest degree.
A £200PC at PC world - costs £561 via NHS supplies.
A £75 HP printer at Pc world, costs £300 at NHS supplies.
Hopefully someone from Govt or a journalist can do something to stop that massive black hole of NHS funding. Allow us to buy what we want from where we want.
Anon because you know where I work.
Do you mean NHS Supplychain? If you do you are talking out of your arse because PCTs are NOT "legally required to stuff from them" (I assume you mean buy stuff from them). It's a choice; Supplychain has to persuade PCTs that it's worth while to link up.
Do you really think that a Chief exec goes through the prices of every item in the catalogue? The deal is done or not done on overall annual savings, which are tracked, reported on and analysed to a tedious degree. You shouldn't assume that the way you do business is the way everybody else does.
My missus and her sister both work in a different local schools and the distinct lack of IT knowledge from teachers up through the local IT services companies employed the local authorities, it's a pigging wonder they have any computers to use!
It regularly takes about 2-3 weeks to have a printer moved from one room to another! A complete rebuild of a bog standard Windows desktop machine takes about 3-4 weeks to get done, and then it's installed manually by an IT tech ( I use the term very, very losely here ) bringing a CD/DVD out to the PC and building the machine on the fly, no docs, no standard build image, manually with manually entered license keys!
Laptops usually last about week before they need rebuilding due to all the popups and nasties, despite installing ( urgh! ) Norton AV. Desktops can go almost where they like on the internet, they have basic porn blocking at county level, but that's all. My Missus has often spoken to the heads about staff using the PCs to get to secure little places like FaceBook and MySpace, in full view of the kids.
We all work in nice little corps with bucket loads of time and money to make desktop builds rock solid, educational authorities do everything on the cheap and it shows. My missus refuses to use the school machines and bought a Macbook, the local school IT guy ( after scoffing at how poor OSX is compared to Windows ) said he didn't have a problem with it being used and simply authorised her onto the WiFI kit! She asked if they need to check or fill in forms, nope! She declined the offer in the end, just in case she passed something nasty along and got blamed!
So before you all start coming up with your grand ideas about how you would do it, spend a month learning how it's done in your local area, you might realise that outside our nice, cosy little corp IT worlds, it's a very different story in "real" world of cheap and cheerful education system.
I feel for them both!
Though not all schools are destitute. One I worked at recently would spend more money on the infrastructure than those using the system at the other end. (New servers + fibre vs old damaged workstations.)
(Imagine asking your boss what he plans to use the blade server he has 'played' with for 2 months then forgotten about about 8 months ago - and then having him tell you he's budgeting for 'another' because the other one is too old... such waste.)
Although I don't like them, I can see that the quango was introduced to guide the schools (useful for those without a clue). My boss could talk for England about how and why he needed something, whether it got used was another thing entirely.
OK maybe I shortened it too much. She bought the machine to get work done, she just happened to ask if it was possible to use the network to print stuff off as it was going to be 2 weeks to get a check done to see if she could connect to the printer through a USB cable!!! When they simply said yes to transferring files over the network to the existing machines and free internet access, with no guidelines on security or internet/intranet behaviour, she thought better of the offer, just in case.
They have guidelines in her school about ensuring where all the furniture and equipment is placed, ensure the door locks are completely child proof, even ensuring how the kitchen equipment needs top be secured away from kids. She had to spend nearly 3 months learning the building regulations and pass the CRB checks to work with the kids. However she can simply walk up to the network and download malware and viruses, send out documents about kids into the internet without anyone checking! Others borrow the laptops, take them home and allow their kids to use them, then bring them back and simply plug them back into the network, no idea if any of the docs about the kids are simply being phished out by nasty malware, copied off lost in transit, nothing!
That was my point, everything else has established guidelines, the IT infrastructure has none.
Clearer now?
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