Harnessing Technology Grant – kicking a grant while it’s down

A few  weeks ago, on 18th June, the Government cut the Harnessing Technology Grant, in order to find capital funds to start Free Schools. I wrote a blog post at the time to summarise the information.

Well, they’ve done it again – this time, when they announced the cancellation of the BSF programme, they also snuck in a further £50M cut in the Harnessing Technology Grant. Here’s a summary of where we stand today:

What’s happened to the Harnessing Technology Grant?

The Harnessing Technology Grant is a 3-year programme, running from 2008-2011 to provide £639M for schools and local authorities to fund some of the capital costs of specific parts of education ICT. This year (2010/2011) the grant was £200M, and was allocated out via formula to local authorities [3]. Each local authority was allowed to retain 25%, to fund central costs eg broadband provision, whilst 75% had to be devolved to schools.

• On the 18th June, when the government announced the creation of Free Schools, they also announced that £50M of the capital funding for them would come out of this year’s Harnessing Technology Grant for schools and local authorities. Cutting ICT grants to fund Free Schools led to a certain amount of commentary from the education ICT community, across Twitter and blogs etc, so I’m going to steer very clear of the emotional side of it, but try and provide a summary of what’s going on to help you to plan ahead if you are in a school, and thinking about your ICT budget.

   

• On Monday, 5th July, the government cut a further £50M when they announced the end of the BSF programme, as part of an overall plan to cut “£1bn of unrealistic inherited spending commitments”. The announcement is in the download on this DfE webpage, but here’s the specific line that matters from the DfE:
  Harnessing Technology Grant – a further reduction to take this year’s funding down to £100m, allowing schools to reconfigure their broadband and IT infrastructure projects onto a more sustainable funding model

This means that schools and local authorities, who were expecting £200M of capital IT budget in this year, will now receive £100M instead. Because the first quarterly payment to local authorities has already happened, I’m guessing that what will happen now is that the local authorities will receive just 1/3 of the grant they were expecting in the next 3 quarters. This will have a big impact on the budgets that schools will receive – see “What Happens Now?” below.

What is the Harnessing Technology Grant for?

The Harnessing Technology Grant is a 3-year programme, running from 2008-2011 to provide £639M for schools and local authorities to fund some of the capital costs of specific parts of education ICT. This year the grant was £200M, and was allocated out via formula to local authorities [3]. Each local authority was allowed to retain 25%, to fund central costs eg broadband provision, whilst 75% had to be devolved to schools.

The DCSF/DfE, through Becta, gave very specific guidance [4] on what the grant was for:

• Learning services: learning platform services, email services, personal storage areas for learners and staff and the infrastructure to access these services. Services need to support the safeguarding of learners, be available for all users inside and outside educational institutions including users’ homes and must be available outside core school hours.
• High-quality digital learning resources in line with Becta’s quality principles, taking advantage of national and local collaboration opportunities.
• Integration of learning and management systems at institution, local authority and – where appropriate – regional level so that data is available securely when and where it is required.
• Parental reporting: online access to reporting systems and information. Schools should provide timely, meaningful and manageable information to parents through appropriate and secure use of management information systems, learning platforms, managed learning environments, messaging services and other suitable online reporting systems.
• Broadband infrastructure to provide services, appropriate to need and safety, with sustainable plans for further development of local and regional networks to ensure that the necessary capacity and services are available.
• Simplified sign-on for users: establishing authentication and authorisation infrastructure capable of granting individual learners with secure anywhere/anytime access to educational resources – must be implemented in conjunction with the UK Access Management Federation using Shibboleth, with the local authority or Regional Broadband Consortium acting as identity and service provider.

And they also spelled out what it couldn’t be used for:

	The Harnessing Technology grant is a capital grant. It can be used to purchase computer software and digital learning resources provided that the resource being paid for can be treated as capital in accordance with normal accounting rules. This can apply to both one-off purchases of software resources, also licenses, depending on the terms of the contract. Subscriptions to services that provide digital curriculum resources on an ongoing basis would normally be treated as revenue, unless the service includes the creation of a capital asset owned by the purchaser. That is, ownership passes to the school or local authority at the end of the service period; or the school or local authority receive a licence to use the resource for a specified time period longer than one year.

The reality, in some schools, is that head teachers saw it as “the ICT money”, and used that (and only that) as their ICT budget. For those schools (I hope you’re not one of them), this news will be a major issue.

So what happens now?

Here’s some assumptions from me:

• The money was distributed to local authorities on a quarterly basis, so I’m guessing that the next few payments to local authorities will be smaller by £100M.
• The money retained by local authorities will probably mostly be already committed to long-term contracts for learning platforms and broadband provision.
  In many local authorities, schools had agreed that the local authority could retain more than 25% in order to provide central learning platform or broadband provision. As these are likely to be in long-term contracts, then the local authority are likely to need to pay the bills for that, whether or not they get the money.
• So the cuts will mainly be in the amount passed on to schools – meaning that schools will lose between 50% and 100% of their grants

Before this news, when the grant was £200M, all local authorities will have told their schools how much grant they will get, and I’m sure that will have been factored into schools’ budgets at the full amount.

I think over the next few weeks, as the impact of the second cut hits, schools will be hearing from their local authority about their plans to ‘claw back’, or limit future payments, on the grant – and in many cases this may mean a total cut in the grant going to schools.

But didn’t they say they were protecting school budgets?

There’s more on this issue on Merlin John Online, but in a nutshell, DfE say that the promise was to protect the revenue budgets (the stuff that pays salaries etc), but that no protection had been guaranteed for capital budgets [5]

So what do schools and local authorities do next?

Now that the cuts have started, what do you do about it?

Well, for a school to rush off and spend their Harnessing Technology Grant as quickly as possible before somebody asks for the budget back isn’t wise (see above!), but perhaps it might be a good time to remind your customers about the primary purpose of the Harnessing Technology Grant (for the areas outlined above) and to continue the conversation about the strategic value of ICT in the learning process – not just for the subjects where it is core - like ICT, business studies, media studies – but across the whole curriculum.

And it might also pay to have a scour of the Top ICT Money Saving Tips, to see if there’s anything there that could help your customers to save money – not just in the ICT budget, but in other department’s budgets in the school.

Quickly find all the Money Saving Tips on this blog