Training

[ayoward]

For my own information, how many of you have been notified by your LA of the Bulk Purchase training agreement that we now have in place for use by LA and school staff?

 

We have brokered a deal that gives public scheduled training courses at massive discounts for those in the consortium. For example, we have recently put on an ITIL v3 foundation course in Rotherham which I believe was attended by all secondary school network managers as well as some from Doncaster. We saved Rotherham Council over £2K over the previouos quote they had had and around £10K against list pricing. Similarly, a MS Exchange 2007 course which has a £1495 list price, we are able to offer at £800.

 

We have published this to all our LA partners, but I was just wondering if this had been cascaded down to school level yet.

 

I would be interested if any of you have had sight of this.

 

Also, in case you were reading this and then thinking you wouldn't reply and never use this forum again now that you know the people who this forum is about read it too, just to make it clear, I have not joined this forum to snoop on anyones comments. I could have snooped without being a member and no one would have known. I have joined this forum so YHGfL can have right of reply. Sometimes the RBC is easiest to blame but there are many wires to cross before it gets to our grid and also wires beyond our grid to get on the internet. We will accept blame where blame is due and hold our hands up but it is not always the case. I also find that often schools don't know how much we do and don't provide in the way of services. Yes, we provide filtered internet services, but we also provide a whole lot more. I'm not sure if anyone knows anything about us other than the fact that our block pages sometimes appear while you're trying to browse the web.

 

Sometimes a little communication is all it takes.

 

Thanks,

 

Andrew Yoward

Head of Support Services

YHGfL Foundation

Edited April 3, 2009 by ayoward
To add some reasons for posting

[leco]

Thanks for this Andrew. To answer your first question about training, no I didn't know about it. In fact I know very little about YHGfL, as you say apart from the block messages, that incidentally appear every now and then on Edugeek.

 

After the Easter hols I will have a look at school for any info that may have been sent and put into the folder in the staff room. (I don't get the time to be in there very often.)

[teejay]

Thanks Andrew, good to have you on board!

No we haven't heard anything about this yet. In fact, we get absolutely no information passed down to us from YHGFL, so we are very much in the dark as to what YHGFL does and what you offer.

[Marci]

Welcome...!

 

how many of you have been notified by your LA of the Bulk Purchase training agreement that we now have in place for use by LA and school staff?

 

That's the first I've heard of it... as above, we get practically no information passed down to us from LA.

 

never use this forum again now that you know the people who this forum is about read it too

 

Meh - the main advantage of forums is a clear and transparent communication medium between any and all involved. If anything your presence here BENEFITS those who use this section, and should also benefit yourselves due to the increased accessibility to user response and feedback on your services. Anyone who uses a forum as a platform upon which to moan behind ppl's backs is missing the point... as that does little to resolve the situation.

[mwalpole]

If it helps for us to post on here, and answer questions you have about YHGfL, we will be more than happy to try to help out where we can with information about products or services that we can offer.

[ayoward]

Welcome...!

 

 

 

That's the first I've heard of it... as above, we get practically no information passed down to us from LA.

 

That is what we are finding quite a lot in the majority of LAs that are members of our consortium. We publish our activities and reports each month to the LAs, but the schools get little or no sight of that. We're trying to make sure that communication from one end to the other as there is massive scope for improvement across the piste. I'm hoping that this forum amongst other initiatives we are undertaking will bring YHGfL out of obscurity. Our website is getting better at publicising what we do (YHGfL - YHGfL), and I'm hoping that I will be able to get our news ticker published on the outside of our Service Centre software http://www.service-now.com/yhgfl.

 

 

 

 

Meh - the main advantage of forums is a clear and transparent communication medium between any and all involved. If anything your presence here BENEFITS those who use this section, and should also benefit yourselves due to the increased accessibility to user response and feedback on your services. Anyone who uses a forum as a platform upon which to moan behind ppl's backs is missing the point... as that does little to resolve the situation.

 

I appreciate your sentiment here. It is exactly what we are trying to achieve at Y&H.

 

Regards,

 

Andrew

[Marci]

That is what we are finding quite a lot in the majority of LAs that are members of our consortium. We publish our activities and reports each month to the LAs, but the schools get little or no sight of that.

 

Simplest solution... RSS Feed of such activites / reports, accessible and subscribable from front page of YHGfL site... accompanied by a quick post in here to say it's there. Word should spread soon enough amongst the school techs...

 

I know majority of schools in our area (Wakefield / 5 Towns) all have representatives on here... they might not post, but the majority still lurk n' read....

[ayoward]

We are looking at RSS feeds from our website at the moment. Hopefully they will be up and running sooner rather than later.

[steve]

Welcome ayoward.

 

As Marci said, your input will be most welcome and appreciated.

 

I've not heard of the training opportunities either, and as you suspect little filters through the LA.

[john]

Hear nothing at all about YHGFL apart from it referenced in letters about why the LEA internet is wonderful as its part of YHGFL basically. So anything exciting you can tell us that will benefit us and give justification to huge sums of capital that it costs us each year for the LEA internet.

[mrtechsystems]

Snap nothing interesting tho

[ayoward]

We publish a report monthly that details what we have been up to. At the moment, I think it just goes to our LA partners. I know that we are trying to get more of this type of stuff published on the website and I know that we are trying to get invited to more meetings where you folk meet with your LA to discuss how things are going so that we can directly inform you of the things that we are up to.

 

We also have a bi monthly meetings for what we call the Network Group and eLearning Group, where we talk about policy and procedures and how the Grid should go forward etc. Your LA will have representatives that attend these meetings and it is up to them to cascade any info relevant down to the schools.

 

I will let you know when we have something on our website that gives detail about all of our services. We are working on it at the moment. I'm hoping it will bring some much needed clarity.

 

Regards,

 

Andrew

[steve]

.... I know that we are trying to get invited to more meetings where you folk meet with your LA to discuss how things are going so that we can directly inform you of the things that we are up to.

 

Our LA has very few meetings for techies. Maybe one every 2-3 years

[leco]

we are trying to get invited to more meetings where you folk meet with your LA to discuss how things are going so that we can directly inform you of the things that we are up to.

 

Our LEA has four meetings a year called the ICT Primary Network - but it is mostly for ICT Co-Ordinators rather than techies.

[rogerblue]

At last it is dawning on the YHGfL that they need to have 'DIRECT' communication with the end users, not empire building LEA staff.

 

Have you ever thought of actually visiting schools yourself?

meetings with LEA staff and schools are of limited value as school staff will not speak freely in frront of the LEA staff, especially those who according to you are supposed to keep us informed (and by all the edugeek posts clearly are not).

 

For example why on earth is 'tyres' on the bad word list???

 

try typing tyres into google search!

 

i asked, reply was because of the Pirelli calendar PMSL so why not block PIrelli then? the calendar itself is no worse than page 3 of the sun that all our kids can see in the local shop as they call in for their fags!

 

Take this message from another thread

 

 

You should be able to get on it now. JANET had power issues at Leeds Uni which interupted acces to Y&H systems and also meant we couldn't access the web from within the grid. They need to sort out the BGP which should have re routed all our traffic to Leeds Met as our failover link. Your LA will be getting a major incident report about it.

 

 

I got an email warning me of this from my LEA saying saturday 7 to 9 am should not affect YHGfL services anyway.

 

However it was on friday (mistake anyway) and it did!

 

who are 'they' who need to sort the BGP if not the YHGfL then why is the grid so dependant on others!

 

Rumours have reached me that some schools in my LEA have been considering asking to join with a neighbouring LEA's system to get away from YHGfL anyone heard anything about this?

 

 

I dont mean this to be a moaning session (i know how it reads) but simply trying to provide some info on why the YHGfL are often perceived as a 2 blokes in a back bedroom outfit!

[john]

Must admit direct YHGFL talks would be good then it would give YHGFL a clear picture of what our issues are as fine yes 1 school isn't really going to change the face of it, BUT if LEAs are not sharing and communicating then you may find that you spot a common complaint and actually its the LEAs systems giving YOU the bad name and reputation due to poor implementation by LEAs.

[ayoward]

At last it is dawning on the YHGfL that they need to have 'DIRECT' communication with the end users, not empire building LEA staff.

 

Have you ever thought of actually visiting schools yourself?

meetings with LEA staff and schools are of limited value as school staff will not speak freely in frront of the LEA staff, especially those who according to you are supposed to keep us informed (and by all the edugeek posts clearly are not).

 

We do visit schools. I personally have been to schools in Calderdale, Doncaster & Sheffield. We will visit just about anywhere we are invited (as long as we have the assurance of safe passage and an understanding that we will have to arrange a strategic phone call back to the office with a code word for if we are under duress ) Our eLearning team are visiting with your teaching & learning colleagues on an alomost daily basis.

 

I will quote now from our headed paper:

"YHGfL Foundation is a controlled company under Part V of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 and a company limited by guarantee registered in England, Reg No 4611988. It is controlled by: Calderdale MBC, Doncaster MBC, East Riding of Yorkshire Council, Kingston upon Hull CC, Kirklees MC, Leeds CC, North East Lincs Council, North Lincs Council, North Yorkshire CC, Rotherham MBC, Sheffield CC, Wakefield City MDC"

 

The LAs fund us and control us. Indeed they pay my mortgage. We do as we are asked. We make recommendations as to how we think things should be run and on any changes we wish to make, but ultimate sanction is with our board which is made up of representatives from all consortium members listed above. Our interaction with schools has to be in harmony with LA wishes.

 

For example why on earth is 'tyres' on the bad word list???

 

try typing tyres into google search!

 

i asked, reply was because of the Pirelli calendar PMSL so why not block PIrelli then? the calendar itself is no worse than page 3 of the sun that all our kids can see in the local shop as they call in for their fags!

 

I think you will find that Pirelli IS blocked. We were asked to block it by some schools whose students were actively searching for the calendar. Pirelli images however aren't always just limited to the Pirelli site, so Pirelli will have quite a high word score on the content filter naughtiness scoring. You probably aren't privy to the way that words are scored through the content filtering, so I am attaching a jpg of the way that your particular search is scored. As you will see, any search for tyres inevitably brings up a link to the Pirelli site, that will send the score over the limit and ban the search result page.

 

While I accept the argument that the calendar is no worse than what they could see in the newsagent, our responsibilty while running this EDUCATION network (i.e. a network to assist in teaching & learning students, not a network for staff to book their holiday, do their internet banking and do a price comparison on the cheapest place to find the new PS3 game.), to protect our children while they are in our care and educate them for when they are not. We cannot control what they can see at home on their unfiltered internet access or on their mobile phones with internet connectivity where they will have access to the whole internet in all its glory, but I am sure taking your argument about the newsagent to its logical conclusion that you are not advocating removing all filtering purely because they can access similar content elsewhere?

 

Take this message from another thread

 

 

You should be able to get on it now. JANET had power issues at Leeds Uni which interupted acces to Y&H systems and also meant we couldn't access the web from within the grid. They need to sort out the BGP which should have re routed all our traffic to Leeds Met as our failover link. Your LA will be getting a major incident report about it.

 

 

I got an email warning me of this from my LEA saying saturday 7 to 9 am should not affect YHGfL services anyway.

 

However it was on friday (mistake anyway) and it did!

 

Different issues actually and not related. Purely coincidental. The one you refer to on the Saturday was a router IOS upgrade which passed without hitch. The issue on the Friday was due to large sections of Leeds being without power from the National Grid for a considerable time, but we digress....

 

who are 'they' who need to sort the BGP if not the YHGfL then why is the grid so dependant on others!

 

"They" are JANET or the Joint Academic Network. This is the UK's education and research network who connect all of the country's universities and colleges together for communication and for onward connection to the internet. It has on Super JANET 5, a 40 gig backbone running up and down the country.

 

Typically in most LAs, schools will connect to a local network which will normally terminate in a central point at some council building or other. Within that building will be a connection on to the Y&H Grid network. This is a network run on Affiniti fibre around the region, but is mostly managed and configured by ourselves. The Grid has two 1 gig pipes into JANET, one at Leeds Uni and one at Leeds Met for resilience. We run mostly EIGRP around the Grid and internal BGP on our JANET links. JANET themselves run the external BGP on their side of the network, and it was an issue with this BGP that was the problem that prevented our normally asynchronous links (we send traffic out of one pipe and receive it through the other thus getting the best use out of our links) from running in synchronous/failover mode (sending and receiving out of the one pipe that was up during the power cut). This of course has now been resolved. We use JANET as they are part of the National Education Network and therefore we have access to content not easily available if we were using BT (as LAs used to) or Easynet or NTL. Certainly the new National Digital resource Bank coming on stream very soon will only to my knowledge be available through the NEN. JANET provide our onward connection to the wider internet exactly the same as if we took our Internet feed from BT or those other providers aforementioned. The difference is that it is considerably cheaper as it is, as we are, run by the public sector for the public sector and so operate on a not for profit basis. Going with any other provider would not guarantee any better performance. The only difference would be that we would be able to enforce financial penalties for a drop in service which we can't currently do. Of course those providers charge a premium so that they don't lose out. We have saved the LAs a cosiderable sum year on year by running the Grid on their behalf as we do.

 

I am attaching a copy of our Grid network diagram which should hopefully give you a visual indication what I am talking about here.

 

 

Rumours have reached me that some schools in my LEA have been considering asking to join with a neighbouring LEA's system to get away from YHGfL anyone heard anything about this?

 

I haven't heard anything like this, but I would be surprised if it came to fruition. If the LEA in question is a member of an RBC, to my knowledge an RBC cannot offer services to schools outside of their area. Also, under BECTA guidelines any school wishing to leave it's LA provided services must substitute that with a like for like service. For example, if they currently have a 10 meg synchronous line, they cannot go to a 2 meg line or to an asynchronous line such as ADSL. Also under the Byron report which has now been accepted as government policy, all schools must have a BECTA accredited ISP. We are on the last lap of having our ISP services BECTA accredited. We are however working with BECTA to come to a more realistic level for their expectations of filtering as if we were to run a true reflection of what they expect, you would be wishing for the halcion days where all you had to worry about was Pirelli being blocked.

 

 

I dont mean this to be a moaning session (i know how it reads) but simply trying to provide some info on why the YHGfL are often perceived as a 2 blokes in a back bedroom outfit!

 

Is that the perception? Come and see us if you like. I will give you a tour of our data centre and our offices should you wish.

 

I appreciate that we can often be perceived as the bad guys, but let me genuinely say that all the team here at YHGfL are incredibly passionate about giving the best service that they can. Yes, we have made mistakes in the past and we hold our hands up. Show me someone who doesn't make a mistake. We get as frustrated as you do when things happen such as they did the other Friday when circumstances beyond our control mean we can't deliver our service as we know we will get blamed. But I think you will agree that compared with two years ago or so when we first started offering ISP services, that we have come a massive distance in terms of reliability of the network and the false positives on our filtering platform. We are continuosly striving to improve and with your help, and feedback such as this, we will get there together. We are not some company trying to fleece you so we can offer you the least amount of service for the most amount of profit, we are not for profit. We're not some fat cats on private sector wages who are paying dividends to shareholders, our shareholders are the local authorities. We are trying to work in partnership to offer the best service we can.

[ayoward]

, so I am attaching a jpg of the way that your particular search is scored.

.

 

, I am attaching a copy of our Grid network diagram which should hopefully give you a visual indication what I am talking about here.

 

Well, I attempted to attach these files, but I don't know where they have gone. So I am attempting again.

 

In case it doesn't work you can find them here:

 

YHGFLYHFSCDocumentRepository < YHPublic < TWiki

 

YHGFLYHFSCDocumentRepository < YHPublic < TWiki

[Marci]

Very informative posts... ta! Good to know how it all works beyond the blinking light in our server room...

[TechSupp]

Good to know there is contact from YHGfL on here. Think I may have spoken to you once about remote access but that was a while ago Andrew. On the subject of training I have been on a couple of YHGfL funded courses, there were not of the technical size of things as I teach as well, but they come in quite handy, e-safety etc. In fact I'm due to be at your offices on a course on Thursday looking at some e-learning resource software 'Fuse', so I hope the lunches are up to scratch and save me a car parking space reserverd for an eduGeek user!

[Leeoakley]

MS Exchange 2007 course which has a £1495 list price, we are able to offer at £800.

 

we may be able to offer a partnership that offers even bigger savings for schools on tech training.

 

please call me on 01905 726222.

 

Lee Oakley

Neos IT