Becta budget cut by £40m

[Dos_Box]

Some links now availbale with more info:

 

Becta budget slashed by £40 million - Yahoo! News UK

 

Becta budget faces 40% cut | Kable

[torledo]

So according to what i've so far read on the internet, becta's budget is either 112.5m or 108m or 55m, and the cuts are either 45m or 40m......and if it's 40% of 108m and that 108m includes the cost of rolling out/administering the Home Access scheme, then i doubt that part of the cuts are going to come out of the funding for that project.

 

clear as mud really.

Edited March 17, 2010 by torledo

[sakwoya]

So in summary, we want to actively leave our RBC / Central Service as its over-priced (when we used to pay for it), provides no services that we feel offer us actual educational benifit, has a poor level of reliability, offer no 21st century features that we as modern schools (and our case a Technology College) want and need and overall it costs too much, if it was a couple of £K a year then yes its probably worth it, but to say that the idea of Central Funded services should mean we don't have to pay for them, we have spent a good proportion of what we used to spend on our Connectivity Fee pre the Harnessing Technology Grant, purchasing technology - both soft and hardware to ensure that we have the technology needed to be able to offer the 21st Century Computer Systems that we pride ourselves on!

 

This caught my eye - Devon CC retained all the HT Grant in previous years but, in 2009-10, passed it to the schools. At the same time they passed on the SWGfL fees to schools - funnily enough they were identical.(previosult HTC had been used to fund SWGfL fees)

 

I began asking about opting out of some of the SWGfL 'services' that we were paying for and got the same response 'Oh dear that will put the costs up for the others'. Inquiring about leaving the SWGfL and going with a third party ISP/connection got more moans and groans from 'above' with the rider that the 'removal of all lines and equipment belong to/provided by SWGfL would have to be paid for by the school' - cue blank cheque which the head is not keen to sign.

 

Excuse me but we are a teeny, weeny little school and we do not need/use many of the 'services' so do we really care if Big School down the road with its 1200 pupils has to pay more? No.

 

A load of the other small schools have joined in with a clamour and we have been told that 2010-2011 should see our SWGfL bill drop from £6500 to around £2000. Fine but I'm waiting to see where the £4500 balance comes from (or has the over-priced GfL cut it's prices?)

 

Graeme

[leco]

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.

[GrumbleDook]

@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.

[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:D

[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]

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

 

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.