Top ICT Cost Saving Ideas for Schools

Top ICT Cost Saving Ideas for schools

So the budget cuts have arrived – and the pressure is on to save money in schools. And ICT leaders in schools around the country are going to need to hone their skills to justify the investments they are bidding for.

Since late 2009 I’ve been working to look at how ICT can help save schools money – either saving in the ICT budget, or another area.

There are areas where ICT can help you make simple and effective cost savings in your school budget. Savings of up to a staggering £350,000 over 3 years.

I've collected many of the stories and examples into a new eBook - Saving Money with ICT - which contains many of the examples and stories that will help you to see how you can help your school save money.

You can download the Money Saving ebook via this link, or click on the front page on the right.

I hope that you find it useful - it's not meant to provide all of the answers, and I'm sure you'll have other ideas. But I believe it's a great starting point to your planning for this year and beyond.

I have one really simple goal: To help the ICT team in school to explain to the leadership team how they can help out the rest of the school.

I hope that what I’m going to share will help you move the conversation 
FROM
“I need £5,000 to upgrade some software”
or
“Can I go on a training course costing £1,000”
TO
“If we invest £5,000 now, we’ll save £10,000 by the end of the year”
which is the kind of thing that head teachers like to hear!

Download your own copy of the Saving Money with ICT eBook

Hopefully this will build up a helpful stock of ideas for you to think of for next year. They are grouped into three money saving strategies:

Save £350,000 over 3 years

If you’re not already doing some of the things in this list, then a secondary school has got a potential to save over £350,000 over the next 3 years. And a primary school could save just under £90,000 over 3 years.

How can that be true, when the average school doesn’t spend that much on ICT? Well, let me go back to what I said when I started the blog series:

	The reason for doing this…was that we all know that there’s a bit of a budget crunch going on – and 80% of network managers in a recent survey reported that they’d had their ICT budget cut. But I’ve come across many examples of where a bit of spending on ICT had saved a heap of spending on another part of the school budget. So I had one really simple goal: To help the ICT team in school to explain to the leadership team how they can help out the rest of the school

So the savings below aren’t just in your ICT budget, but also in the electricity bill of the school, and the staffing budget, and your phone bill. All things which could be reduced by putting into place some of the advice. And really helping you to have the right conversation in the school – about the way that ICT can save money elsewhere in the school budget. As you get down to the detail for next year’s ICT plans, then I hope this list is helpful in drawing up priorities for your strategic ICT development.

Specific ICT cost savings

I based my assumptions on large-ish schools, who are reasonably technology rich - mainly because that’s probably the closest match to you, as a blog reader. (I’ve put my barebones assumptions at the bottom of the table.)

All of these savings are based on money that could be saved over the next three years, and in most cases, they are based on costs from a real school used in the original blog post.

• For Secondary schools I assumed 1,000 pupils, 400 computers and 13 servers.
  The ‘average’ secondary school would have 860 pupils and 300 computers.

• For Primary schools I assumed 100 computers and 4 servers.
  The ‘average’ primary school would have 240 pupils and 50 computers.

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Recent updates on Money Saving Tips

The list below contains the 15 most recent blog posts on the subject of 'Money Saving Tips' - a mix of product stories, school case studies, and interesting snippets from other sources. Clicking on any of the links will take you the article - or click here to see the full list of all Money Saving Tips articles