July, 2010

It’s not often that the TES reports on ICT – apart from a couple of pages tucked away towards the back of the magazine. But today they’ve splashed articles about ICT on the front page of the main newspaper and on the front page of the magazine. Unfortunately, in keeping with ‘good news is no news’, you won’t be surprised to learn that it’s dominant because of the bad news on ICT.

In the main newspaper, they focus on the cut in the Harnessing Technology Grant to schools (something I wrote about on 7th July – does that mean I scooped a paper by nearly a month?) and the impact it will have on local authorities and schools.

	Raid on IT budgets doubles to £100m Experts warn of disaster as Gove plunders technology pot to fund free schools Read the full article

And in the magazine, a similar dramatic start gives you the flavour of the whole article:

	Byte the dust Hundreds of millions of pounds are spent on ICT equipment every year, but there is growing evidence that school cupboards are brimming with unused and obsolete kit that should never have been bought in the first place. Read the full article

So is that it? Are we back to the turn of the century, when only bad news allowed ICT to creep out of the special termly ICT supplement? Well, despite the gloomy headline, the magazine article does give both sides a voice. And I think that means that there’s a chance to look on the positive side.

There is no doubt that budgets will be challenging. And if you’re an ICT leader in a school, you should expect a much, much more difficult set of questions about your ICT investment plans going forward. But don’t get downhearted. There are so many ways that ICT can make a contribution to the success of a school – not just in learning, but in teaching and minimising other costs, that you could actually come along like a knight in shining armour to save your school money.

I’ve been working steadily on the Top ICT Money Saving Tips for the last six months, continuing to add more detail and to identify additional case studies of schools that have actually implemented the savings. And I’ve also carefully questioned and checked all the claimed savings. What started as a list of Top 10 ICT Savings has turned into 14 ways to use ICT to save money from the school budget. And for a secondary school, the savings quickly mount up – to a potential saving of up to £350,000 over three years.

I don’t expect you to believe me straight away. I expect you to challenge the numbers, and look for the evidence. But I’ve approached the whole exercise with your head teacher’s perspective. I’ve imagined them asking ‘Prove to me that this saves me money’.

And I hope that my latest version of the Top ICT Money Saving Tips for schools does exactly that. Please take a look – it just might help you if somebody in your school has read this week’s TES!

Two numeric examples of how fast things are moving forward in education ICT these days:

Windows 7 is being rapidly adopted in schools

The chart below shows the visitors to this blog this month. Which shows just how fast Windows 7 is being adopted, and displacing Windows XP (the Windows Vista number has been dropping a little, with people moving to Windows 7, but the Windows XP users are moving faster)

As most readers of this blog are from UK schools, and most network upgrades happen over the summer holidays, I’m guessing we’ll see Windows 7 beating Windows XP by the start of the new term.

Microsoft’s cloud is being rapidly adopted across education, around the world

I saw this Tweet yesterday evening:

The press release it links to lists a few of the numbers around the move to cloud services. Outside of education, 13 of the top 20 global telecom firms, 15 of the top 20 global banks, and 16 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies are now using Microsoft’s cloud services. And over 10,000 customers in more than 40 countries have chosen the Windows Azure platform in just nine months.

And in education, over 10,000 universities, colleges and schools in more than 130 countries are now using Microsoft’s Live@edu cloud-based email and collaboration service, serving 11 million students, staff and teachers worldwide. Today’s announcement was about the University of Georgia, which is moving 85,000 students, faculty and staff to our cloud based email, calendar and documents service. Dr. Barbara White, chief information officer at the University of Georgia, put the reasons pretty clearly:

	With Live@edu, we believe we will have a best-in-class communications and collaboration infrastructure including full-featured e-mail, increased storage space, better spam protection, and mobile phone integration, Live@edu will help us transform the campus learning environment by connecting our students, educators and staffers through the cloud. This transformation of our infrastructure will also provide capabilities to our students that they will use in their educational pursuits as well as in their future careers.

Find out more about Live@edu

I was at Capita’s SIMS Annual Conference in Nottingham in June, talking about the future of technology, and how it will impact the workplace over the next decade. I’ve been invited to give this presentation at a wide range of conferences this summer, partly because it is one way of thinking about the world that we’re preparing students for (especially as the majority of students starting a new secondary school this September will be joining the workforce in a decade). Of course, talking to a conference full of people who deal with masses of real student data every day is a little intimidating, as many of the concepts for the future are based on emerging trends, rather than empirical data, but I think I got away with it…

Unfortunately I could only make it to the second day of the event, and Gerald Haigh (who was there the whole time) told me I’d missed a great story from a primary school, where they’d spoken about how they were using the SIMS Learning Gateway (which is based on SharePoint) to enhance parental engagement.

Here’s Gerald’s summary of what I missed:

	Ray missed Harry Weightman’s Conference presentation. Harry’s head of Easington Colliery Primary in County Durham, and he’s top value at any conference. I feel great affinity with him. He’s a Northerner, a primary head, as I once was, and very much in tune with his children and his community as I tried to be. And like me, he’s a person of a certain age trying hard to keep up with technology. So when he speaks, I sit up, ready to learn. The point about Harry, though, is that he talks not about technology or statutory obligations, but about people – children, teachers, TAs, parents. And he speaks of them with real familiarity and affection. He illustrated his talk at the SIMS Conference with some video clips that make the complete case for online parental engagement. All of the talk to camera, by teachers and parents, is about real children in the classroom, and I’m pretty sure that I only once caught the word ‘data’. You can view the clips here. Take parents Barbara Archer and Kristian Burnett for example, in clips 3 and 4. You’ll notice there are slightly different takes on engagement on show here, reminding us that there’s really no such thing as a homogeneous group called “parents”. Barbara Archer is your typical juggling working mum, diverting into the Learning Gateway on her laptop at work when a gap opens up in a meeting. “I can suddenly tap in if we’ve got five minutes free and I can have a little look and see what mischief or what good points are coming up….It means I feel a lot closer to what’s going on in their daily life. It really works for me.” Then there’s Kristian Burnett, the archetypal proud dad, whose bursting enthusiasm and love for his six year old daughter shines from the screen. “She’s reading, she feels proud, and I can give her a little treat.” By choosing Barbara and Kristian to showcase his Learning Gateway – cheerily informal, and focused on their children’s overall well being in school rather than solely on the minutiae of their performance -- Harry demonstrates his own values and priorities. For their part, though, Barbara and Kristian, are clear that they don’t just want a one-way relationship with the school. Both say they want to be able to feed comments back, perhaps in quite simple terms to start with. “Then at least the school could feel that we are using it and not just reading it,” says Barbara Archer. Harry Weightman strongly agrees, but believes that the feedback issue isn’t straightforward. “The picture that’s emerging is that various feedback channels are needed. For example there’s the obvious one where the parent wants to respond back to a particular person. Then there’s the more general type about a broader issue in school, and we need to signpost to parents who are the key people to approach about particular areas of school life and work.” What particularly interests him, though, is the growing call for a feedback route that, as he puts it, “bypasses the school and is parent to parent.” What he means, of course, is the parent forum, where, says Harry, “They can contact each other and say, ‘I haven’t a clue how we can make this Roman fort, can anybody help.” And the great advantage of using SharePoint, of course, is that all these features are well within technical reach, and will emerge as parental engagement evolves. Finally in his conference presentation, Harry reminded the audience of not just his priorities, but of the reason why we’re all doing the jobs that we do, by showing us a clip in which young Jordan explains how the SIMS Learning Gateway works. (Clip 5) Jordan’s sign-off, I fancy, raised more than just a laugh. Did I detect a sense of guilt among the educators in the room when he said? “It’s a good invention. They should do it more often for more schools. They should have thought of it earlier.”

You can find out more about the SIMS Learning Gateway on the Capita Children’s Services website.

Quickly find all the other Learning Gateway posts on this blog

Well you can be sure that up and down the country, the question “What do we do now?” has been asked in lots of schools and local authorities since the DfE announced the end of the BSF programme. I’ve heard lots of different opinions on the future in the last two weeks (and have even seen some people cycle through the five stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Negotiation, Depression and Acceptance).

Last week I had the chance to chat with Tom Ormerod, the BSF ICT Project Manager at Rotherham MBC about their plans going forward. They have been hard hit by the BSF announcement, as they were due to go ahead in their first phase with 5 secondary schools, 1 primary school and 3 Special Schools, and the DfE announcement means that it is likely that they’ll all be shelved. There may be a small reprieve for one primary, and one secondary which may go ahead with a rebuild as it becomes an Academy. The challenge for Rotherham is that their newer PFI schools in the borough are of a much higher standard than the rest, and they were hoping that BSF would bring all of their schools up to the same standard.

Tom described their reaction to the cancellation as:

	Shocked. Although everyone knew that there were going to be cuts and challenges, nobody expected such a dramatic and absolute end to the programme. It’s especially tough when our two neighbouring authorities are going ahead to the conclusion of their current programme.

Of course, everybody – especially the Head Teachers and their teams - were deflated by it, but Tom described a sense of camaraderie that developed – with people aiming to make the best of a bad situation. Through the BSF planning Tom had formed a core group who’d defined an Output Specification and were ready to meet the suppliers to take it forward. And the critical issues was that BSF wasn’t just about the buildings, or just the ICT – it had been seen as a route to transform learning in Rotherham and to develop teaching and learning across all schools. Their attitude became “Just because BSF has ended doesn’t mean the work stops”. Which led to inevitable question of what could be saved from their plans

So where next now that BSF has gone?

Although there isn’t yet a full plan for how to move forward, what Tom’s ICT group has done is accept where they are, and see how much of their planning so far can be developed and implemented. For example, one of the team’s biggest challenges in the BSF model was to ensure that ICT teams in schools saw the positive benefits of the BSF process. Having focused on that, it would be a shame to lose momentum, and drop into a void.

Tom is focusing on some of the current provision – for example the Rotherham Grid for Learning (RGFL) broadband provision – which was due to transition as BSF came in. Tom described them as being “lucky to have fantastic high speed broadband connections to and between schools, and we want to continue to develop that”. In the past this had focused on Internet connectivity – with a 10MB link to the web – but now they are looking to completely refresh the whole infrastructure – networks, hubs, new servers – and implement new central services to help schools. For example, they plan to deploy the Live@edu email system across the whole authority to replace their existing central email service. With the new system, they will be using Forefront Identity Manager and ILM to make it easier for schools manage users, and they’ll also provide much larger mailbox sizes, the central solution will provide more flexibility to schools than their traditional central system.

OCG will be working with Rotherham’s joint venture partner, RBT, supporting Tom by implementing Single Sign On for the users – staff and students – which creates one RGFL account. That gives them a central learning portal account, which also acts as their internet, filtering, email and SharePoint login.  And by integrating the account provisioning directly from the SIMS systems in each school, it means that as soon as a new student or staff member is added into SIMS, they will automatically get their new email account and SharePoint login setup. SharePoint 2007 is implemented across the borough for all of their schools, and Tom’s recently seen the usage jump up, to the extent that they are now working with 87 schools and service teams within the borough – allowing them to develop more effective collaboration.

As always though a few of the secondary schools will continue to opt out and run their own Exchange server. But the new plans has changed the view of some schools - two schools that had their own mail servers have changed their mind, and have decided to opt-in to the Live@edu service – bringing more schools back on board to the central service. As Tom says “That might increase further as more pressure arrives on budgets, and the schools realise that they can save money by switching to a hosted system.”

Of course, money is tight - the double whammy impact is that the Harnessing Technology Grant has been cut too – but Tom and the team are continuing to make the best of it. For example, although their original plan was to deploy Office Communications Server to improve collaboration and communication, they are now looking at how Windows Live Messenger, through Live@edu, can help them to achieve some of the planned goals.

Moving forward in the future

As Tom says:

	It doesn’t mean doing all things centrally, but doing the right things centrally, and using the collaborative power of the schools to make better procurement choices. IT, and the services it provides, are just another one of the school essential services. We need the services like we need the other utilities, and we can’t deliver learning without them. The schools recognise that the central services are provided to them as part of the cost of the provision of their broadband. And some schools do choose to opt out of some of those services – some schools don’t want mail, some schools choose their own VLE – but the majority of schools choose the whole package of services, and it is more efficient and effective for us to provide those centrally, rather than every single primary and secondary school running their own. Primary schools especially need simple central systems which can remove a headache – like making it very easy for them to add new users to the systems, which cuts down school workload and makes their life easier. I have the advantage of a group of schools and head teachers that realise the benefit of working together and collaborating. That’s been a positive outcome of the planning that we have been doing for BSF . It would have been great to get shiny new schools, with shiny new kit and professional server rooms. But now BSF has gone we can at least look at saving the ideas we generated.

Quickly find all the other 'Live@edu' posts on this blog

Yesterday, Chris Rothwell, who leads our work on Live@edu in the UK, was talking to schools at the Learning Gateway Conference in London. I asked Chris for the slides from his talk so that I can share them. But first here’s the background from Chris:

	I was lucky enough to speak at the Learning Gateway Conference in London yesterday – in the lovely setting of Church House right by Westminster Abbey.  I did a session entitled “A look at Live@edu” which was really well attended – and was a great interactive session with lots of questions about how Live@edu can help individual schools and local authorities deliver communication and collaboration services differently.  If you were there – thanks for coming and making the session lively!  I’ve seen a tremendous acceleration in the adoption of cloud-based services in schools over the last few months, and I think the approach is switching from “why would I?” to “Why wouldn’t I?”. The issues that are on people’s minds when they think about procuring a cloud service are often very different from the issues they think of about running their own servers and services.  My session walked through all the reasons that people get excited about cloud services, but then also talked through a lot of the issues that I’ve been describing as “Yeah, but…” and how Microsoft’s approach to the cloud is helping our customers feel good about issues like data, security, integration, support and more.

If you were there and want to take another look, or if you missed it and want to see more, Chris’s slides can be found here.

Chris tells me that the dominant topic of conversation across the day was budget cuts, and the impact on IT services in schools.  Lots of people are already feeling the impact directly, others are still very uncertain about what the future holds and what the final impact of the budget cuts and changes might be.  With that context, Live@edu provoked a lot of interest as people look to take advantage of the free services we’re able to provide in order to improve the services they provide to students and make substantial cost savings.

Find out more about Live@edu

I noticed last week that Scott Guthrie announced the release of the beta of WebMatrix. Basically, it’s an easy and free way to get started building Web sites on Windows. WebMatrix is a tool for building, customising and deploying your Web sites in one common, straightforward way. The idea is that WebMatrix can be used by a wide range of developers, and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to use it. It brings together a bunch of our resources into a simple install - a Web server (IIS Developer Express), a database (SQL Server Compact), and a programming framework (ASP.NET). It’s a simple free download – just download and install it onto a spare server.

But the extra useful bit is that you can then use the Microsoft Web Application Gallery to install and customise popular ASP.NET and PHP open source community applications, whilst also seamlessly integrating with our professional development tools and servers including Visual Studio, SQL Server and Windows Server.

The Web App Gallery contains a long list of free downloads to install on top of WebMatrix, including Moodle, Joomla!, WordPress and a long list of other free apps to install (the main categories are: Blogs, CMS, eCommerce, Forums, Galleries, Tools and Wikis)

It also includes a new, easier-to-learn syntax for ASP.NET to provide you with a faster way to build standards-based Web sites. The built-in helpers simplify the use of ASP.NET to perform increasingly complex and common tasks like connecting to a database, displaying a Twitter feed, or embedding a video.

This means that you can have the flexibility and freedom to use the tools you choose, and have an easier way to deploy web servers that fit into your existing IT infrastructure.

You can get WebMatrix by downloading the Web Platform Installer, and then install additional apps from the Web App Gallery

Following on from the Deploying Windows 7 Live Meeting last month, Richard Lane (who’s our resident techie in the Education team) is hosting a pair of Office 2010 Live Meetings in July. As it is a Live Meeting (or, its alternative moniker, a ‘webinar’), you don’t need to leave your desk, and no travel is needed – you can simply logon to the Live Meeting website, and you can join in, and ask questions as we go along.

Richard and I debated the timing for these meetings – should we try and squeeze them in before the end of term – and decided that you’d probably have more time to join once term’s over, and you’ve got more control over your schedule!

Microsoft Office 2010 introduces rich and powerful new ways to express and share ideas, which matches the way that students are working today, and the needs of teachers. Join this webcast for a demonstration of key features that will resonate with both students and teachers alike.

• Discover how Office 2010 will enable you to bring ideas to life with advanced video and picture editing, broadcast capability in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, easy document preparation through the new Microsoft Office Backstage view, and visualise data in new ways with Microsoft Excel 2010.
  
  
• See the new Office Web Apps 2010 – online companions to Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote – which enable you to review and edit documents from a variety of web browsers.
  
  
• Understand how students can collaborate better by taking shared notes or co-authoring documents in real-time with a fellow student.

This session will be mainly demonstration based – there will also be the opportunity to have any questions you have answered.

Dates and Times

You can join the meeting on either Tuesday July 27^th 10:30 – 11:30 or Wednesday July 28^th – 11:00-12:00.

You’ll need to register in advance here and you’ll then get a confirmation email and joining details.

What equipment do you need?
You will need a PC with a web browser and either headphones or a telephone to hear the audio - To save time before the meeting, you can easily check your system to make sure it is ready to use Microsoft Office Live Meeting, using this link

One of the hidden costs of ICT in schools is the power usage of the equipment you’ve got around your school. I call it hidden because it is often not visible to the IT team, and the full energy costs of all of your servers and computers are simply part of the school’s overall electric bill. I’ve written before about the potential for cutting school budgets by reducing energy bills (see the Top Money Saving Tips for all of the details and savings calculations).

As we release new products, we are doing more and more to help you manage and reduce power consumption. For example, both Windows Vista and Windows 7 reduced the power usage of a typical PC configuration, by reducing the power it uses when in use, as well as better management and use of low-power states such as Sleep and Hibernate.

On the network management side, we’re making a lot of changes to System Center Configuration Manager, with Release 3 (R3) due this year – this now has power management built within it to help monitor and manage all of your networked PCs.

For a typical secondary school, the potential savings run into tens of thousands of pounds, so it is definitely worth looking at how you can more effectively manage your power usage. Conserving power at the desktop level translates not only into potential cost savings through power consumption reduction it also has the added benefit of helping to reduce your school’s overall carbon footprint. This will become more important as the carbon reduction targets start to hit you – with a government target of a 53% reduction in school carbon emissions. 

Power Management in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3

While energy-saving desktops and laptops have been available for some time, many organisations are not getting the most cost and energy saving benefits from these devices because power-saving settings are often disabled out of fears of data corruption, to support overnight IT operations, or simply from force of habit.

Client power management with System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3 helps you get manage the energy consumption of your hardware by providing a set of power management tools to enable centralised client power management. If you’re using Windows 7 , it allows you to easily optimise power settings on a granular level, and if you’re using earlier versions of Windows, it takes full advantage of the power management capabilities available in them.

Configuration Manager 2007 R3 tools allow you to:

• Monitor current power state and consumptions

• Plan and create a power management policy and check for exceptions

• Apply power management policy to enforce different power settings for peak and non-peak periods

• Check compliance and remediate non-compliance

• Reduce energy costs associated with power and reduces CO² emissions

• Report savings in power consumption and costs

Client power management with Configuration Manager 2007 R3 can yield you potential cost savings with minimal effort and expense.

Where to find out more about System Center Configuration Manager

There are three levels of further detailed information:

1. For an overview of System Center, take a look at the System Center website
   
   
2. For the Configuration Manager specifically, take a look at the System Center Configuration Manager section
   
   
3. There’s more detailed specifics still in the Power Management Datasheet
   
   
4. And more detailed still, there’s a quick demo the power management capabilities, on the System Center blog
   
   
5. Read all the above, and want to play with it yourself? Well, you could always download the free System Center Configuration Manager beta and try it on a test server.
   
   

One of the best events Kristen and Stuart (who are the Microsoft UK Partners in Learning team) ran last year was the Summer Camp, where teachers created resources for teachers, the results of which can be found here. Due to popular demand we are running the event again this year, and we are making it an open invite to teachers in your school. So if they have time this summer, perhaps plans for other events and holidays have not materialised and they still want to spend time with other innovative educators, then this is an ideal event for them.

Summer Camp takes place at Microsoft UK Headquarters in Reading, starting 10:30am on Monday 16th August and finishing 5:00pm Tuesday 17th August. You need to find your own way there, the train is best, with a free bus from the station. We have sorted a hotel and  an evening meal.

What will I be doing at Summer Camp?

We will give you training in using our free software to create teaching and learning resources for the classroom. There will be plenty of time to design, create and evaluate those resources and collaborate with others. Attendees will also get the chance to speak to experts at Microsoft about our technology. These resources will take the form of screen capture videos, which we call Innovids. Each teachers will also receive a headset with microphone (which will be used to create the videos) and  a certificate awarding them “Microsoft Innovative Teacher” status. They will also join a select group of teachers as part of the Partners in Learning Network that have opportunities to contribute to the work Microsoft Partners in Learning are undertaking in education in the UK.

How do I apply?

We don’t want videos or lengthy biographies from anybody to apply, just email three tweetesque type statements to itnukteam@hotmail.co.uk  before the closing date 12:00pm 12th July 2010. These statements should be ideas of how they would, or are using Microsoft technologies to support learning across the curriculum. For example:-

• using conditional formatting in Excel to help visual learners in numeracy
• using PointPoint to create animated flicker books
• using the Songsmith to create mobile ringtones

Also include details of your school, subject expertise and pupil age range in the application. We will select 15 applicants with the most intriguing and innovative ideas, who will be notified on 13th July 2010.

I am not an ICT teacher is it worth me applying?

Yes, most definitely, we are looking for classroom innovators in learning, rather than techie whizz kids. This event is targeted at those Teachers in the UK interested in teaching and learning, and how technology can support that, rather than the technology itself. This event is for teachers in the UK in Primary, Secondary and Special school settings.

What will be expected of me afterwards?

We expect you commit to creating at least two Innovid resources, with an option of creating up to three more. For every resource that we publish and use, we will compensate each teacher for their time and professional input.

We are looking forward to receiving applications. If you have any questions post a comment or contact us via email at itnukteam@hotmail.co.uk

Get applying and Good Luck.

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, the DfE have said (in the Q&A to the announcement) that they'll pay the next quarter's money, and then not pay any more. 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 your schools budget at the full amount.

I think over the next few weeks, as the impact of the second cut hits, you’ll be hearing from your 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 you do?

Now you’ve got all the facts, what do you do about it? Well, rushing off and spending your budget as quickly as possible isn’t wise (see above!), but perhaps it might be a good time to remind your head teacher 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 you to save money – not just in your budget, but in other department’s budgets in the school.

Quickly find all the Money Saving Tips on this blog