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For those who may not be aware, as well as the cuts on BSF there was a further £50m cut to the HT grant yesterday, as part of cutting capital spend.
This will mean that those who have had money will have more clawed back or there may be an increase in costs for other things further down the line.
This is getting very serious now as it is not just the cutting back on VLEs, IWBs, etc ... it is throttling everything ICT related in schools.
So that is a further £50m in addition to the original cut?
Bad news indeed.
Here the HTG is being used toward RBC broadband upgrades, as I understand once the money is gone its just hard luck for any school who haven't been upgraded (or pay for it yourself). A real kick to those school who haven't received the HTG in return for a promised BB upgrade.
Wonder what will happen to embc costs with a reduced/no HTG?
It is a further 25% cut ... so the cut is now £100m ... a 50% cut in total.
As for EMBC I would ask folks to hang fire on speculation ... LAs are looking at things and remember that each LA deals with it slightly differently.
Time to invest in slate and chalk - I'm not kidding either. It's going to be BAD.....
Agreed and I am only talking about my own situation but I have seen the options that were up for discussion when things weren't this bad and they are now... interesting to say the least.Quote:
Originally Posted by GrumbleDook
I'm looking for the 56K modem we have buired somewhere!
Considering the HT grant is IIRC topsliced in nearly its entirety down here, this is going to be an interesting few years. We're rural, so internet connections are expensive, so I wonder if we're going to end up with bigger bills...
I know that Nottinghamshire are / were looking at going directly to Synetrix and merging various broadband links to create "one County, One Network". As they identified significant cost savings with this I would be interested to know if it will still continue.Quote:
Originally Posted by GrumbleDook
Any official links on this one?
This is dreadful news!!!
I have just finished emergency planning with the first 25-30% cut and we just about scrapped by!!! this will be terrible if true!!!
Department for Education addresses £1bn of unrealistic inherited spending commitments - Department for EducationQuote:
Originally Posted by burgemaster
You arent the only one! I spent a better part of my day doing ours!Quote:
Originally Posted by burgemaster
Is the posted document additional cut?
As I read it, it says the HT grant is down to 100million instead of 150million.
So was it 200m of spending before?
Yup - it was £200M a couple of weeks ago, the first cut was to fund Free Schools (£50M) and then the additional £50M was cut yesterday, bringing the remaing HT Grant down to £100M.
At first I was fooled, and that they'd double-announced the cut (the opposite of the trick of the last government, who used to double announce new spending), but no such luck
Yes, it was originally £200m. The first cut was to fund Free Schools (rather than take the money from the extension of Free School Meals ... which would have been politically stupid apparently). The cut is apparently 'to help ensure no additional borrowing this year' and it is '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' ... or rather it forces people to go for cheaper options (usually meaning cutting corners, keeping old kit running longer, using feature-deficitiant kit) or just not using stuff at all!
Things that are likely to happen ... areas with good broadband coverage for home and business (large urban areas) will have schools that will drop off to cheap asynchronous lines cutting back on remote / external access to resources, possibly dropping filtering too (especially if they are dropping an RBC connection) ... making it interesting (and hard work) to move email provision and possibly even established VLEs.
In more rural areas it will be even more expensive to do things, and whilst you might get an 8 meg line in London for a decent price try that in rural areas in Northants. Areas where ADSL sites should get 2 meg but frequently are 500k. The same applies in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, etc ... unless the Govt forces an improvement in the broadband infrastructure of the entire country (sorry for being England specific here) the we have areas that will be severely negatively affected.
And yes ... the dropping of lines which are filtered onto raw household style lines is a *big* worry I have. Large secondary schools may do the job (though not always) when it comes to looking after their own filters through open source options ... but the reason why commercial companies do well are because they really do make a difference.