Becta budget cut by £40m

[leco]

@leco ... IIRC with these things (one was done the other year in a similar vein) a company is contracted to run the survey and report on it. They get x amount per response and they then get matched sponsorship from another company (often as a tax write-off) to make a donation.

The company needs to get responses ... Becta don't care that there is an enticement as they have already paid for it to be done.

Wasn't complaining about the inducement to participate merely saying that I would like to get paid at £12 an hour. So me having a slight dig at how much tech staff are paid rather than how much the research company were paid. Sorry if I wasn't very clear.

[GrumbleDook]

Ah .. I thought it was a fairly good dig at Becta having budgets cut but still donating money to charities.

It wasn't a dig at you (or your dig) but just trying to explain to folk how these incentives sometimes work.

[leco]

Ah .. I thought it was a fairly good dig at Becta having budgets cut but still donating money to charities.

It wasn't a dig at you (or your dig) but just trying to explain to folk how these incentives sometimes work.

I think I'd better stop digging now before the walls cave in and bury me

[sahmeepee]

A lot of people never got to see the stuff that came out of the research Becta funded, partly because the site was hard to navigate but also because you had to know what you wanted to look for ... or have a hard-copy thrust in your face.

My particular favourite was the paper they did on open source software use in schools (Open source
software in schools: a case study report). In true BECTA style they managed to confuse open source with free (as in beer) software. The BECTA definition of Open Source included Star Office, ProDesktop, Crocodile Clips and IrfanView! In order to maintain their reputation for high quality research, they used a massive sample size of 9 schools on which to base their study.

According to the email I had back when I complained to BECTA, the study cost £18,000 to produce. Bear in mind that the vast majority of its contents were factually incorrect. I was also told:

...there has been much discussion about the distinction between low cost and freeware and true open source software. I can assure you that we have had these conversations internally and with our partners in the open source community and will take this issue forward for any future Becta outputs.

Ha! Is that the most weasel-worded capitulation ever?

I know you have concerns about informing our audience but we feel that the report has gathered real information about real schools. We are sharing it with a wider audience so that schools can make informed choices.

Genius. This is a prime example of why I feel BECTA should have been shut down years ago. They have very little clue, they have zero rigour in their approach and yet they remain arrogant enough to tell schools they are right to spread misinformation. Shutting down BECTA may well be the only good thing the next government does.

[torledo]

[/quote]
According to the email I had back when I complained to BECTA, the study cost £18,000 to produce
[quote]

if that's typical of the cost of these 'studies' or reports, call them what you will, then they must have produced a few fair few of these if they managed to buzzsaw through a 55mil quid annual budget.

That part of the budget that wasn't spent on the salaries of 250 staff that is.

i can see why there were an easy target for budgets cuts.

[torledo]

Genius. This is a prime example of why I feel BECTA should have been shut down years ago. They have very little clue, they have zero rigour in their approach and yet they remain arrogant enough to tell schools they are right to spread misinformation. Shutting down BECTA may well be the only good thing the next government does.

if the next govt. do shut down becta, it's more than new lab have the bottle to do, even now with this somewhat forced decision to outline some cuts.....12 years on, after hundreds of millions spent.

[GrumbleDook]

@sahmeepee

Yep, Becta have gotten a number of things wrong and you will often find that lessons have been learnt.

To make sure the information about open source is correct you now have Open Source Schools as a funded project.

Personally I don't agree with the evangelism that you find in some sectors of the open source community as they fail to recognise that 'free' to a school will generally mean that they have to pay nothing to 'body' or company to install it. Free as a description of code and use of code means that it is too open to misuse when the terms are applied to software in general.

I love the description that Miles Berry gave at the recent EMBC spring event ... that we also have free as in Free Kittens. You can take them away, even breed them, but you have to feed them, take them to the vet, etc ... For some schools this view could help them understand TCO of 'free' software. It helps when you are explaining the Moodle is Open Source and 'free' as in no purchase / licence cost, but there are costs in time, hardware, training, creating courses, etc ... and possibly even costs in development time and expertise, no to mention branding, marketing, etc ... and not to mention the time and cost to the school to change who they deliver the curriculum to the kids.

But now we have gone the other extreme ... and Becta are being driven to be anti-Microsoft. Perhaps there are some good reasons for this (eg monopoly and free trade) but there are stupid reasons too.

The reports ... the costs is a portion of the staff salaries, but also the costs of expenses when they have been out to schools or have paid for people to meet. When you have 18 people round the table from 7 companies, 3 Govt departments, 2 LAs and 4 schools these add up. At least Becta can quantify it ... I know many LAs who wouldn't and darn few schools that would be able to (admittedly .. the schools who I have asked for some similar info just can't be bothered to stick the figures together as why should they have to show value for money like this?)

[bossman]

Not wishing to go off topic but I found it interesting that today I received an email from Becta research. (When I was doing my degree I often consulted the research arm.) Anyhow I was invited to take part in a survey, it would take 15 minutes and to compensate for my time spent they would donate £4 to the Haiti appeal. (I would really like to get paid at that rate!)

I completed the survey/questionnaire, but it took the best part of an hour. Not necessarily because any of the 16 questions were particularly difficult to answer more that some were shall I say poorly worded. The whole thing was aimed really at senior manglement but asked some technical questions at the same time.

On the whole quite intriguing given the current financial situation under discussion here.

Ditto here and this is why certain parts of the Government think tanks falter in their delivery because they do not have the experience factor or the people who can ask common sense questions.
I found that at least 65% of the questions were targeted at upholding the BSF one shoe fits all model and were to me unreliable at gaining the required information needed for a true picture of IT in education.