HT Grant cut again!

[GrumbleDook]

For those who may not be aware, as well as the cuts on BSF there was a further £50m cut to the HT grant yesterday, as part of cutting capital spend.

 

This will mean that those who have had money will have more clawed back or there may be an increase in costs for other things further down the line.

 

This is getting very serious now as it is not just the cutting back on VLEs, IWBs, etc ... it is throttling everything ICT related in schools.

[CHR1S]

So that is a further £50m in addition to the original cut?

[sparkeh]

Bad news indeed.

Here the HTG is being used toward RBC broadband upgrades, as I understand once the money is gone its just hard luck for any school who haven't been upgraded (or pay for it yourself). A real kick to those school who haven't received the HTG in return for a promised BB upgrade.

 

Wonder what will happen to embc costs with a reduced/no HTG?

[GrumbleDook]

It is a further 25% cut ... so the cut is now £100m ... a 50% cut in total.

 

As for EMBC I would ask folks to hang fire on speculation ... LAs are looking at things and remember that each LA deals with it slightly differently.

[tech_guy]

Time to invest in slate and chalk - I'm not kidding either. It's going to be BAD.....

[sparkeh]

As for EMBC I would ask folks to hang fire on speculation ... LAs are looking at things and remember that each LA deals with it slightly differently.

 

Agreed and I am only talking about my own situation but I have seen the options that were up for discussion when things weren't this bad and they are now... interesting to say the least.

Edited July 6, 2010 by sparkeh

[buzzard]

I'm looking for the 56K modem we have buired somewhere!

[localzuk]

Considering the HT grant is IIRC topsliced in nearly its entirety down here, this is going to be an interesting few years. We're rural, so internet connections are expensive, so I wonder if we're going to end up with bigger bills...

[36Degrees]

 

As for EMBC I would ask folks to hang fire on speculation ... LAs are looking at things and remember that each LA deals with it slightly differently.

 

I know that Nottinghamshire are / were looking at going directly to Synetrix and merging various broadband links to create "one County, One Network". As they identified significant cost savings with this I would be interested to know if it will still continue.

[burgemaster]

Any official links on this one?

 

This is dreadful news!!!

I have just finished emergency planning with the first 25-30% cut and we just about scrapped by!!! this will be terrible if true!!!

[DMcCoy]

Any official links on this one?

 

This is dreadful news!!!

I have just finished emergency planning with the first 25-30% cut and we just about scrapped by!!! this will be terrible if true!!!

 

Department for Education addresses £1bn of unrealistic inherited spending commitments - Department for Education

[featured_spectre]

Any official links on this one?

 

This is dreadful news!!!

I have just finished emergency planning with the first 25-30% cut and we just about scrapped by!!! this will be terrible if true!!!

 

You arent the only one! I spent a better part of my day doing ours!

[gaz350]

Is the posted document additional cut?

 

As I read it, it says the HT grant is down to 100million instead of 150million.

 

So was it 200m of spending before?

Edited July 6, 2010 by gaz350

[rayfleming]

Yup - it was £200M a couple of weeks ago, the first cut was to fund Free Schools (£50M) and then the additional £50M was cut yesterday, bringing the remaing HT Grant down to £100M.

 

At first I was fooled, and that they'd double-announced the cut (the opposite of the trick of the last government, who used to double announce new spending), but no such luck

[GrumbleDook]

Yes, it was originally £200m. The first cut was to fund Free Schools (rather than take the money from the extension of Free School Meals ... which would have been politically stupid apparently). The cut is apparently 'to help ensure no additional borrowing this year' and it is 'a further reduction to take this year’s funding down to £100m, allowing schools to reconfigure their broadband and IT infrastructure projects onto a more sustainable funding model' ... or rather it forces people to go for cheaper options (usually meaning cutting corners, keeping old kit running longer, using feature-deficitiant kit) or just not using stuff at all!

 

Things that are likely to happen ... areas with good broadband coverage for home and business (large urban areas) will have schools that will drop off to cheap asynchronous lines cutting back on remote / external access to resources, possibly dropping filtering too (especially if they are dropping an RBC connection) ... making it interesting (and hard work) to move email provision and possibly even established VLEs.

 

In more rural areas it will be even more expensive to do things, and whilst you might get an 8 meg line in London for a decent price try that in rural areas in Northants. Areas where ADSL sites should get 2 meg but frequently are 500k. The same applies in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, etc ... unless the Govt forces an improvement in the broadband infrastructure of the entire country (sorry for being England specific here) the we have areas that will be severely negatively affected.

 

And yes ... the dropping of lines which are filtered onto raw household style lines is a *big* worry I have. Large secondary schools may do the job (though not always) when it comes to looking after their own filters through open source options ... but the reason why commercial companies do well are because they really do make a difference.

[Sylv3r]

The schools broadband connection is the heart beat running through the school - it is essential that this works now for a school to operate. Cutting corners / reducing bandwith will have a detrimental effect on everything that we do.

 

Self hosting websites

Self hosting mail servers

VLE's

etc etc, for those schools that provide access to youtube for staff - they may have to think again as there may not be enough bw to go round!

[gaz350]

It's not so scary providing your own broadband. We cut our ISP costs down to 4.5k a year for a 24meg/3up bonded connection when embc were still offering 2meg lines for 10k. 10meg costs were being offered at £15k don't know if this is still the case but I know we can now get a 100meg leaseline limited to 20meg for 10k now.

 

We left embc 3 or 4 years ago now saving us a shed load of £££.

[localzuk]

It's not so scary providing your own broadband. We cut our ISP costs down to 4.5k a year for a 24meg/3up bonded connection when embc were still offering 2meg lines for 10k. 10meg costs were being offered at £15k don't know if this is still the case but I know we can now get a 100meg leaseline limited to 20meg for 10k now.

 

We left embc 3 or 4 years ago now saving us a shed load of £££.

 

Who are you now with? And are you following the 'must be connected to the NEN' rule?

[gaz350]

And where was that rule made?

[localzuk]

And where was that rule made?

 

By the DCSF? It was brought up and linked to a load of times on here in the past, whenever someone discussed 'breaking away'.

 

I'm searching for some form of document outlining the requirement and am yet to find a definitive one - there seem only to exist strategy documents and the like...

Edited July 6, 2010 by localzuk

[GrumbleDook]

It's not so scary providing your own broadband. We cut our ISP costs down to 4.5k a year for a 24meg/3up bonded connection when embc were still offering 2meg lines for 10k. 10meg costs were being offered at £15k don't know if this is still the case but I know we can now get a 100meg leaseline limited to 20meg for 10k now.

 

We left embc 3 or 4 years ago now saving us a shed load of £££.

 

Love that 'money saved' bit ... and also see my comment on about secondary schools doing things.

 

Also consider how much it costs you to run your own email, website, external DNS, filtering ... the licences, the hardware, the energy costs, and your time as a technician / engineer / admin.

 

Yes, I know this can be covered pretty well by a fair few folks ... but not all, not by a long stretch. The other problem that some schools will also face is the incoming bandwidth to the school ... especially when you have a hundred or so staff and students remotely accessing stuff, whether it is terminal servers, VLEs or other resources.

 

But hey ... I'm a bit biased here ... but I have done it from all sides (non-RBC school, moved to RBC in a school and working at an LA managing the RBC for schools) ... and, as mentioned before, the impact will vary in different LAs.

[john]

Who are you now with? And are you following the 'must be connected to the NEN' rule?

 

I've yet to find ANYTHING useful on the NEN that we've had marketed to us as a school. I'm not saying there isn't anything useful on it at all, but to say i've had various brochures and leaflets on "this is on the NEN and RBC etc", our staff (that's teaching before people think I'm just talking me) found only 1 site they used on the setup and that was Loc8 which I beleive is an RBC thing for us (but could be wrong), which they said they could loose access to and not worry. Other stuff they had referenced was not worth it or they have alternatives that are perfectly suitable and not part of the NEN. What is the benefit of it and where is the amazing list of reasons to have a NEN connection apart from this wonderful blue skies dream of everyone sharing info together in a big happy world where pigs fly and money grows on trees?

 

The NEN rule was also a recommendation by BECTA wasn't it not a law thus surely is now in limbo with the end of BECTA?

 

In terms of the further cut to the HT Grant, I know what that will mean for us in schools, we will see bills for Connectivity back on our desks, Central VLE and other such services, all of which will be horridly over-priced and unaffordable to a school facing redundancy's to ensure it stays within its means.

 

We will be using bonded ADSL once we see a bill for the Connectivity if its anything of the scale of 2 years ago which was unaffordable then. We don't use much remote data for the simple reason we have to have large discussions and justifiy it too much and then find it blocked and stopped by the existing system from having those opportunities to do what we want and how we want it, so its not something we would miss or suffer from loosing, in-fact we would hope to improve our systems by removing the weakest link in them which is the existing ISP who in my view has been a poor service from the initial day.

 

Don't get me wrong, I am sad to see the reduction of grant for IT in schools, they need that grant to invest and work with but there is a point where it becomes too much, already we are scaling back our ideas for future developments due to these cuts all of which will cause big issues for us as a school to harness new technology.

[gaz350]

Sorry I wasn't deliberately being difficult, I keep hearing it too... But really what does it provide? We are a smLl county...

 

Our county top slices nearly £700 per student, we are a rural county with very few issues. For example a similar school in another part of the country with a pretty well off population would probably be closer to £250 per pupil. (we have 750 pupils)

 

Going back to the broadband situation, at the end of the day your head needs to take risk. For us it's either computers to use the connection or no connection at all.

[GrumbleDook]

NEN rule (guidance) ...

 

Basically schools should make use of NEN available resources by either being connected to the NEN or by running authentication into NEN compliant services (ie becoming your own IdP under UKAMF). This is raised against duplication of purchases (the RBC, LA, cluster, etc purchase resources or give access to resources and schools then also purchase), lack of efficiencies and failure to use resources that are available to improve T&L.

 

It gets mentioned in the OFSTED report on ICT in schools (talking about embedding of ICT and provided resources).

 

NEN resources also include thing like access to library / museum materials in some LAs, providing remote access to materials when at home if you are authenticated (eg once you log into EMBC at home you can access you school's account for Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Education City, Expresso, etc) ... again, you might have this through other means but the idea is to make it as simple as possible and just use a single U/N and P/W (single sign-on) ...

[localzuk]

Sorry I wasn't deliberately being difficult, I keep hearing it too... But really what does it provide? We are a smLl county...

 

Our county top slices nearly £700 per student, we are a rural county with very few issues. For example a similar school in another part of the country with a pretty well off population would probably be closer to £250 per pupil. (we have 750 pupils)

 

Going back to the broadband situation, at the end of the day your head needs to take risk. For us it's either computers to use the connection or no connection at all.

 

Offtopic: Sorry, your LEA top slices £525k from you?? The HT Grant won't be anywhere near that amount! Your entire school budget will only be around £3m for that number of pupils...