What happened to the "We are opting Out" Thread

[conehead]

I think we should stop worrying about schools who's ICT is not up to standard.. we all know the the BSF is a good thing for tham... we should focus on the schools who have good ICT and how we can keep ICT in-house..

 

Sadly I can't see how this can be done. Schools cannot opt out just because they are feel they are set to lose technically under BSF without giving up the funding. The idea of ICT being managed in an geographic area is to achieve a blanket minimum standard across all schools and get those buzzwords "economy of scale" into play.

 

My take on opting out is if all the schools independently of the LEA , or together with the LEA ICT department approach an outside company that has the neccessary profile to form a venture company. If this is done in advance of BSF they could then bid for the ICT part of the contract. The trick there would be getting that company to agree with you that what you think is desirable from a contract can be fitted to their blueprint or business model of ICT service under BSF.

 

Not ideal but maybe a case of choosing you master.

Edited March 17, 2008 by conehead

[Grommit]

Sadly I can't see how this can be done. Schools cannot opt out just because they are feel they are set to lose technically under BSF without giving up the funding. The idea of ICT being managed in an geographic area is to achieve a blanket minimum standard across all schools and get those buzzwords "economy of scale" into play.

 

My take on opting out is if all the schools independently of the LEA , or together with the LEA ICT department approach an outside company that has the neccessary profile to form a venture company. If this is done in advance of BSF they could then bid for the ICT part of the contract. The trick there would be getting that company to agree with you that what you think is desirable from a contract can be fitted to their blueprint or business model of ICT service under BSF.

 

Not ideal but maybe a case of choosing you master.

 

This is what the original thread was about... Someone said that they were opting out and keeping the funding....

[GrumbleDook]

The original poster of the thread *did* remove the thread at the request of the school. Apparently the information in the post was not full and was not correct, so he removed it.

 

According to PfS, at the moment there is *no* school that has managed to opt out of the managed service setup without losing money (and I think that this is likely to mean that no school has dropped out of it at all, not when they are going to lose £1450 per head).

 

If a school was to do this then yes, it is likely to be at ministerial level that a decision is made, after everything else has broken down.

 

When it happens, no doubt it will be made very public and information will be forthcoming. The various agencies are aware that we are *very* interested in this story. If anyone knows of any change then let me know and I'll follow up when I can.

[bossman]

Hi All sorry to open up this thread again but does anyone have a recollection of the school in question?

[GrumbleDook]

The only school that I am aware that has opted out is Tollbar. They have been a bit high profile about some stuff in the papers (Private Eye and Yorkshire Times) but as with all things, the journalistic version, the schools version, the LA version and the Govt version of things do not quite match up.

 

Steve Moss has written a response about it on his blog and no more info has come out.

 

To some extent this is not completely a good thing, as they are now removed from the system and cannot work to help improve it ...

 

Oh well ... no pleasing everyone I suppose.

[webman]

To some extent this is not completely a good thing, as they are now removed from the system and cannot work to help improve it ...

 

Maybe not, but a small loss in comparison to the huge gain they get. The advantage is that they have escaped the wrath of the managed service - the 33 pages of faults, the leaky roofs, the network issues - all of the so-called "bedding-in" problems that have been associated with some BSF builds (£70m new school buildings 'riddled with problems' (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus))

 

Why work to help improve something that should be right in the first place? Why work to help improve something that rips schools off for all they're worth? Why ......

[Sylv3r]

Couple of links here:

 

School forces climbdown over money to keep computer system - Yorkshire Post

 

IT 4 Education - £13.9 Million?

[fatty_wim]

if anyone is interested in further details surrounding options for a managed service then please PM me.