The Government should encourage the private sector to provide more attractive one-stop managed services to schools to avoid a “technological meltdown”, according to Wired to Learn: What’s Holding Up the School of the Future?, the report by Tom McMullan which was commissioned by the Adam Smith Institute. The former head of Northern Ireland’s Classroom 2000 project and current board member of the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency warned of key weaknesses with the way schools bought and maintained technology.
It said less than 10 per cent of the approximately one million PCs in British schools were covered by a managed service contract, which removed the burden of computer and network maintenance from schools.
McMullan said schools had shied away from these contracts because they were seen as more expensive than existing arrangements and the lack of certainty about future budgets.
Schools needed long-term contracts from suppliers that guaranteed a working service, not just a particular number of machines.
He criticised the Government’s focus on the number of computers in schools rather than the way they were being used: “The point is not about how much equipment you have, but how you maintain and use it.”
McMullan also called for all schools to get very high-speed internet connections within two years. He estimated the cost of giving all English primaries an 8Mbps link and all secondaries a 34Mbps connection at pound;265 million a year - 10 times that for narrowband. “Such an investment, although substantial, would unlock the potential of ICT to transform teaching and indeed the nature of schools,” he said.
These connection speeds were recommended to the DFES by the so-called Rothschild report, which has never been published.
The full potential of the UK’s investment in ICT in education would not be tapped unless teachers had greater confidence about ICT, McMullan said. That called for a universal laptop leasing scheme so that all teachers who wanted personal access could have it within two years.
Chris Johnston
