Future of ICT provision/support in schools

[KWestos]

I used to work for a local authority and the sharing of ICT worked amazingly well. 4 District and Borough Council's ICT departments merged to form one ICT unit. There was one Director, one ICT Network Manager, one Project manager etc etc. All the councils had different flavours, i.e vanilla, novell, Linux etc. But with correct planning and implementation, training, budgetary control, it worked fantastically. One centralised call centre was implemented. The knowledge sharing was fantastic. They realised that there was so much duplication with all the councils (both resources and personell) it was a no brainer. Each council adopted the best practice from the other councils, some systems were lost in favour of better ones, but all in all, it was great. No autonomy or control was really lost. No one council took precedence, all the councils, no matter how big or small they were, were treat as an equal, with an equal voice.

 

On this basis, I don't see how this could not work in schools. I know everyone (including me) is protective of their network and resources, but the reality is, I think the current environment will change. How I don't know, but I bet it's not far off my example.

[SteveT]

Gazes into my crystal ball:

 

1. Most schools become Academies.

2. Academies in a Local area band together to provide economy of scale.

3. They need to differentiate their objective as Education rather than providing other support services to their communities.

4. They become so powerfull that the government gives them the Authority to run their own systems and devolve responsibility to local politicians in the interests of democracy.

5. They thus become known as Local Education Authorities.

 

Oh dear ............ erm .................

[NikChillin]

Gazes into my crystal ball:

 

1. Most schools become Academies.

2. Academies in a Local area band together to provide economy of scale.

3. They need to differentiate their objective as Education rather than providing other support services to their communities.

4. They become so powerfull that the government gives them the Authority to run their own systems and devolve responsibility to local politicians in the interests of democracy.

5. They thus become known as Local Education Authorities.

 

Oh dear ............ erm .................

 

RE-ESTABLISHING THE ESTABLISHMENT!

[Gibbo]

From what I have heard of others in the academy already, they have basically had what I suspect BSF would do. I.E. rip it all out and you will do it our way.

Thats fine for a school with a poor ICT subsystem, but we have quite a new and good system thanks. So is all my work of the last fours years going to be ripped out?

 

I've just had a recycling company round and we were talking about academies. He said he's taken (FOC, not paid to take) some fairly good condition (<1 year old) stuff from schools becoming academies. I'm disgusted that we're having to make do with second hand equipment and other schools are giving the same kit away to recyclers.

[localzuk]

let assume this for one second :-

 

The LA has a datacentre, VDI workstations, virtualized servers, for all schools it governs, its managed, has all software you need, all support included.

It will be top sliced form your ICT budget say £x per user

 

Would you go for it?

 

No. Reliability, flexibility and differentiation of individual school needs would eliminate any cost savings doing that. Would we be able to turn around to such a setup and say, 'we want X,Y,Z ready in 1 week' and have it happen? In my experience of LAs - no.

 

Personally, I think LEAs will disappear across the county in the current form. The government has already pretty much said they want all secondary schools to become academies.

 

Instead, small groups of local academies will work with each other, like we are doing now in preperation to our change over, with our local upper school. Groups of, say, 10 or 15 schools should have no issues working together to aid each other - the decision making process would be relatively short, compared with an entire LEA where, say, 300 schools are involved.

 

I doubt many schools will move to 'managed' solutions, due to the horrors being revealed from other schools which have tried it, but a few will. Some may centralise ICT provision within a cluster of schools, meaning the lead school in the area takes on the responsibility.

[KWestos]

Some may centralise ICT provision within a cluster of schools, meaning the lead school in the area takes on the responsibility.

 

That's exactly what I have been talking about. It's silly to have a group of schools in close proximity all doing 80%+ the same thing when it could be centralised with fewer overheads. Why have 12 individual data centres when 1 will do?

[GrumbleDook]

To quickly jump in here again and point out a few issues ... mainly legal in nature.

 

Local, informal confederations of schools informally sharing services and hosting between them raise a number of issue.

1 - If data from school A is hosted at school B have you told the parents? Does your Data Protection Policies reflect this? When something goes wrong who is legally liable?

2 - Access to resources shared between schools is a problem. Without a central decision-making person it creates tension between the schools. Who will pay for this person and who will set their targets? A committee? They work so well ... Would it be a single school? How do you stop staff in that school putting pressure on that individual for preferential treatment for them or their school?

3 - Who takes control over the safeguarding aspect of things? What happens if techie from school A changes a setting which, indadvertedly, allows a child at school B to see something seriously disturbing?

 

There are a lot more things I could put but I don't want to be seen as being a blocker on the idea. It all boils down to this would need to have to be on a commercially contracted solution, either as a separate business or sold from a lead school. It becomes a managed service in all but name.

 

There is a lot of mileage on this ... a lot of mileage on sharing expertise, resources and time ... EG shows that ... it is just hard to get the ball rolling, is fraught with some legal issues and is subject to politics between schools.

[irsprint84]

To quickly jump in here again and point out a few issues ... mainly legal in nature.

 

Local, informal confederations of schools informally sharing services and hosting between them raise a number of issue.

1 - If data from school A is hosted at school B have you told the parents? Does your Data Protection Policies reflect this? When something goes wrong who is legally liable?

2 - Access to resources shared between schools is a problem. Without a central decision-making person it creates tension between the schools. Who will pay for this person and who will set their targets? A committee? They work so well ... Would it be a single school? How do you stop staff in that school putting pressure on that individual for preferential treatment for them or their school?

3 - Who takes control over the safeguarding aspect of things? What happens if techie from school A changes a setting which, indadvertedly, allows a child at school B to see something seriously disturbing?

 

There are a lot more things I could put but I don't want to be seen as being a blocker on the idea. It all boils down to this would need to have to be on a commercially contracted solution, either as a separate business or sold from a lead school. It becomes a managed service in all but name.

 

There is a lot of mileage on this ... a lot of mileage on sharing expertise, resources and time ... EG shows that ... it is just hard to get the ball rolling, is fraught with some legal issues and is subject to politics between schools.

 

There is alot legally to deal with but this already happens with BSF so can be done in practice (No BSF jokes!)

 

The IT Director or whoever is at the top is the person fully responsible as I am from taking over our Internet from the council

[GrumbleDook]

There is alot legally to deal with but this already happens with BSF so can be done in practice (No BSF jokes!)

 

The IT Director or whoever is at the top is the person fully responsible as I am from taking over our Internet from the council

 

I;m not saying it can't be done ... it can ... it has to be formalised, bound within legal contracts, set out clear services and boundaries, etc ... but we have already heard from others in the thread who are resistant to anyone running things other than them (often for valid reasons) and there have been so many arguments that BSF did *not* offer enough flexibility or value for money (again ... something open to discussion).

[synaesthesia]

I don't have a huge amount to say on the subject, other than I really hope people are not left with offsite support as their only port of call.

I also really do not want to see people reliant on VDI solutions either. It's a good system but not for entire schools as it writes off too much ability.

And the less said about "The Cloud" the better. It's a buzzword I'd like to see die off very soon because it's definitely misused and certainly not a be-all and end-all solution.

[irsprint84]

I would plan for each high school to host three primary schools close by with VDIs also you can licence Microsoft per groups of schools now but keep the high school as fat clients.

[Guest GarnierSkinNaturals]

Large companies have large WANS which function just 'fine'.

 

Bringing schools together essentially creates the managed service. It makes sense to do this in many schools but as Dook says there would be lots of implications.

[mthomas08]

I don't have a huge amount to say on the subject, other than I really hope people are not left with offsite support as their only port of call.

I also really do not want to see people reliant on VDI solutions either. It's a good system but not for entire schools as it writes off too much ability.

And the less said about "The Cloud" the better. It's a buzzword I'd like to see die off very soon because it's definitely misused and certainly not a be-all and end-all solution.

 

I feel the same at times, there are advantages and disadvantages with it all. The place I work at just simply wouldnt work with outsourcing its IT Support, it is very reliant on getting it done "Now" or very "Quickly". As for cloud, I was looking at SQL provided by MS and although I am not sure if this includes schools or accurate but if I remember correctly you do pay for it monthly. And that cost is created from how much space you use and how much data is transmitted a month. For us here at the moment that just would not work, every year our intake of students increases and we still take on every student we can during term times. Even though we are always full we always squeeze in extra kids and if we was having to pay for "each user" that also wouldnt work for us. It is also the main reason why we purchased from, we pay for the system not bandwidth, user amount or web space we use. Which for us is exactly what we want.

 

BSF being a prime example, we would have to pay per user which is an immense price, our budget was 170K last year and that still wouldnt of covered the cost of BSF for our school. You can also imagine how we would have struggled this year with the budget cuts. If the likes of cloud computing is the future then when the costs are down we will look at it but it is still relatively young.