IT Capital Spend

[techie08]

Hi everyone

 

Would anyone be will to share with me how much they spend each year on IT captial in their school? For example how much you spend on renewing ICT Suites, replacing servers and printers etc.

 

Im trying to put a case together on a realistic figure for IT Capital each year so i need to guage how much everyone else spends.

 

Many Thanks

[Achandler]

You would need to give a few more details on how much IT equipment you have there.

 

A school with 2000 students and 700 computers will spend way more then that is half the size.

[techie08]

You would need to give a few more details on how much IT equipment you have there.

 

A school with 2000 students and 700 computers will spend way more then that is half the size.

 

About 600 computers (90 of them iMacs and 200 of them Laptops) 4 Lapsafe trolleys, 60 Printers, 4 servers and a SAN. 76 Promethean IWB's

Edited March 1, 2013 by techie08

[pcstru]

About 600 computers (90 of them iMacs and 200 of them Laptops) 4 Lapsafe trolleys, 60 Printers, 4 servers and a SAN. 76 Promethean IWB's

 

What's realistic depends on the state of the equipment (fundamentally is it fit for purpose), and what you are being asked to do (what are you responsible for).

 

I'd be looking at the refresh rate and budgeting on that basis for hardware. We currently try for a 5 year rolling replacement of PC's and laptops - although we struggle a bit to achieve that 100%. We do much the same on servers but storage I run on a 3 year strategy because the technology is more volatile (I don't want to invest in storage I won't need until years 4-5 of a 5 year strategy). Network infrastructure I run on a 5-10 year basis - the longer times for cabling but the core switches I expect to get 5-8 years out of. Then there are printers, phones, software licences/support, consumables, external support, subscription services, and a chunk of contingency (things that break before they are scheduled to retire).

[psydii]

Start by reading the school development plan, understand its five year priorities, and its local social-political-economic environment then build a model of IT Services to support that from the classroom backwards. Have a disscusion, sell the vision, then cost it. Focus on the outcomes/development for the teachers and learners.

 

On the fact that you mentioned capital specifically:

Capital/Revenue is a bit grey when it comes to IT spend. The big big stuff can often quite reasonably be either. Though a large investment in cabling would be tough to sell as revenue to the auditors.

 

So the following is what I aim to get in total for everything bar sallary costs... and many schools are not able to find to this level of revenue funding... FSM etc makes a substantial difference to what can be achieved.

 

£1250 per pupil every five years would deliver all your IT to a gold standard, including the software (provided you pressed your suppliers hard). £900 would get you good, with significant compromises. You have to get creative and have the Governors Head and Business manager on board though, since that level of funding usually requires substantial changes to "the way things work around here". In reality to get from nothing to the gold standard for an IT Service without a massive up front capital spend you need 7+ years, starting with the wires, wireless and IWBs. Then moving on to funding what you do with them. IF starting from nothing then Office 365 allows you to jump start your 'servers' without needing the large investment in site-local storage and backup.

 

It is very important that any plan delivers the development of the skills to make the most of the proposed investment. The IT Service team needs to be superb, and the staff need to be continually pushed to improve their skills and uses to appropriately support the learners.

 

This level of funding should enable you to maintain a 3:1 computer:student ratio, keep your IWBs working, ensure you've got GbE to the desktop, VOIP, Server Storage and Backup, decent security and systems monitoring, training, and enough to flex the end user device mix ratio every three years or so as curriculum needs evolve.

 

If you have existing kit that works then you can really target your funds on specific elements. The really difficult bit is persuading the Powers That Be that the initial priorities may be on the un-sexy stuff like cabling that isn't rubbish, servers and switches, without which you can't support the equipment/software that make the difference at the teacher/student side of the service (like 1:1 or new IWBs).

 

In today's environment that level of spend is difficult to achieve. You have to chase funding streams to get to the gold standard. Get the core right and then move round the building area by area project by project. Though somethings have to be standardised (like the IWB experience, and application and data availability), which means you need to hit the whole site at once, which to make affordable might mean that you need set up operating leases, which is where a 5-10 year felixible plan comes in useful, as it provides strong supporting evidence for the 'operating' nature of the expenditure.

Edited March 1, 2013 by psydii

[CyberNerd]

About £85 per student

[fiza]

I worked mine out to be £104 per student per year.

[techie08]

I worked mine out to be £104 per student per year.

 

How many students?

[fiza]

How many students?

 

1200 on roll

[CyberNerd]

About £85 per student

 

1750 on roll. budget £150k +- £30k depending upon renewals and projects,

[zag]

Yeh £100 per student here as well.

[Geoff]

Commercial so not directly comparable. ~£1850 per employee. Approx ~£1000 of that is capital. I'd guess the figures would be interesting to you guys though.

[pantscat]

Are all these figures just CapEx or OpEx too?

 

My CapEx figure works out at around £135 per pupil.

[psydii]

To summarise my above post: £200 per pupil per year is what I'll actually end up getting. How that is split between capex an opex depends on what we are doing in a given year. £40-80 of that comes from project funding that requires efforts of our SLT to secure.

[john]

Wow I would love your budgets, I'm lucky to get £40 per student cap and opex combined if that and extra funds have run dry so its getting harder and harder to do anything to the point that I've shelved a replacement program as I keep saying it but we just cannot afford to do it. Here's hoping new leader will improve things.....

[CyberNerd]

Wow I would love your budgets, I'm lucky to get £40 per student cap and opex combined if that and extra funds have run dry so its getting harder and harder to do anything to the point that I've shelved a replacement program as I keep saying it but we just cannot afford to do it. Here's hoping new leader will improve things.....

 

Time to move out of your MS happy zone

[john]

MS is one of the cheapest costs we have ironically! It's the fact I'm not allowed to have quotas as staff aparantly do need 30+Gb documents and our shared drive needs to be huge, sixth form alone is over 20Gb! Oh and our Media rich curriculum doesn't help lots of external factors contribute to it

[CyberNerd]

MS is one of the cheapest costs we have ironically! It's the fact I'm not allowed to have quotas as staff aparantly do need 30+Gb documents and our shared drive needs to be huge, sixth form alone is over 20Gb! Oh and our Media rich curriculum doesn't help lots of external factors contribute to it

 

Our 6th form drive is 2TB we just pay for the broadband.

[truebluesteve]

Ours is about £110 per pupil based on around 2000 on roll, although this has dropped from around £130 about 3 years ago. The school population is set to grow again over the next 5 years due to a new estate being built nearby so hopefully we will see an increase.

[localzuk]

To be honest, I can't give a clear example for us. We seem to bounce between spending £200k in a year then dropping down to spending £20k for a couple of years. When I find myself in a position to think "ah, we're settled and stable", suddenly a new project comes along to add another ICT suite or something, which completely blows my future ideas out of the water again.

 

However, at the last school, which had around 1200 kids from infant up to 16, my strategic plan advised a spend of around £180,000 a year to keep things at the same gold standard. This covered all equipment, from PCs and printers to IWBs and projectors, switches and servers etc... So, £150 a pupil.

 

If I could turn around to my boss at this school and ask for a formalised budget (I don't actually get one, I have to flit around and hope a lot of the time), using those same sort of figures, I'd want £82.5k a year for 550 pupils. However, because of the weird set up across the site, the first year of moving to this scheme would involve a higher spend so as to get us onto that funding cycle.

[jmak]

There are of course lots of ways of calculating this: Do you include my salary? Average additional support spend that I buy in? Office systems?

 

But if we're talking about what I get to influence, which I know is what goes on the ICT spend in the annual financial return to the auditors which has to cover all cap ex for network, servers, teachers', office and classroom hardware, IWB, projectors, cameras, AV kit, OS, curriculum software and subscriptions, I get a grand total of........

 

£27.88 per pupil per year!

 

280 pupils and 39 staff included for EES purposes.

 

Just worked this out. Can't quite believe this. Might have to go and see the Head on Monday....

Edited March 2, 2013 by jmak

[mattianuk]

£283 per student, roughly.

[techie08]

£283 per student, roughly.

 

How many students do you have on roll?

[techie08]

Do most of you guys have to take consumables, cables etc out of your budegts or are your figures purely capital such as PCs, servers etc?

[pcstru]

Mine covers capital, consumables, software, services/support and a bucket of contingency. This last year all in was around £160 per pupil, of which £85 was capital spend. That's quite unusual compared to previous years where it has been more like £115 total, £42 of which was capital.