BSF Managed Services Costings Outragously Expensive

[greenfieldsupport]

Will toner and paper be included.

because i get 10k a year really but we use 5 on toner and paper??

 

so do we get toner and paper??

or is it another £25k on top of the half a mil?

[GrumbleDook]

It is up to your school / LEP / LA ... you can view consumables as a running coast and it has to be paid for by the school, but it does mean that you get to haggle with suppliers and you can get good deals depending on the time of year, month, week, day ...

 

Or you can roll it into the overall costs and have less to buy hardware with.

 

The Capital funding used to cover many IT costs will not be there, but other funding often used is ... SSAT funding, funding from research projects, grants from charitable groups ... and there is nothing stopping schools from using this money to do extra things. The support for these extras will have to be negotiated with the managed service company but it is workable. ("What do you mean 'the shutdown time for servers after the UPS kicked in is not quick enough? Have you by any chance loaded anything extra onto the UPS that we don't know about? Oh ... another 3 servers ... yes ... that might explain it!" - conversation overheard at a company that provides managed services for a very large UK business ... so it is not just schools!)

[greenfieldsupport]

hehe so we could hand them £500,000 and then after 3 years they could go bust...

and then we would have nothing??

 

great

[greenfieldsupport]

hehe so we could hand them £500,000 and then after 3 years they could go bust...

and then we would have nothing??

 

great

[Grommit]

The per child per year is meant to be a lump sum at the beginning ... so if you are told it is £100 then for the 5 years you get £100 x 1200 x 5 = £600,000.

 

Admittedly, this covers the spend on *all* IT, so you get the servers, the software, the desktop, the laptops and then you work in the additional costs (replacement after 3 years, spare parts, additional hardware, etc)

 

Yes you get the £600 000.00 at the start.. Subtract the £120 000.00 for Basic Managed Services.. you have £380 000.00

 

Then you invest in CCTV, Access Control, Servers, New ICT Suites, MIS, Network Infrastructure, IWB's Projectors etc ... really there is nothing left from the £380 000.00 infact there will be a shortfall like at most places....

 

(as you will be restricted in where you can purchase equiptment from and there will be no ICT Manager to check up on the costs)

 

Who told you that you only have funding for one year? Did they tell you everything it would have to cover? Does it presume that the costs of the network infrastructure are already covered? IWBs and projectors?

 

The BSF Consultants told me that there would be only funding for the first year and the other years the school must find it's own funding..

 

So if the school spent their money on upgrading that's thier choice as they would be in a 5 year contract with the MSC...

[psydii]

Four points:

 

You'd be mad to (use BSF to) fund consumables - get deptartments to pay for paper and ink - it will encourage more creative methods of delivering teaching materials to the kids.

 

If the LEP or the ICT partner go bust the physical equipment should already belong to the Authority; you get to keep the kit. A new partner would be found and TUPE ensures that the techs are transfered (or so HR have led me to believe).

 

Regarding the Managed Service Charge - ours is less than 100GBP pspa, and the schools have agreed to pay for the first five years - it is significantly less that the exisiting ICT spend, but it is more than the salaries of those to be TUPEd. This makes the 5yr pot to be in the region of 1.4 - 2.8 Million per school. Which ain't bad.

 

Is there anybody here who has sight of more than one borough's programme?

[broc]

Regarding the Managed Service Charge - ours is less than 100GBP pspa, and the schools have agreed to pay for the first five years - it is significantly less that the exisiting ICT spend, but it is more than the salaries of those to be TUPEd. This makes the 5yr pot to be in the region of 1.4 - 2.8 Million per school. Which ain't bad.

It may not sound bad, but be sure you are looking at the total cost of service provision before you get too excited.

 

If the charge per student is less than £100 per student per year, based upon the conversations I have had with BSF Consultants, this level of service charge almost certainly does not include any funding for equipment replacement within the contract period; it will probably exclude equipment repair costs & replacements due to accidental/deliberate damage too. So by year 5 of the contract you will have a school full of 5-year old kit..... well used..... & no immediate prospect of replacement.... as there will be no money unless the school sets aside money year on year, or pays the service provider a lot more than £100 per student per year to fund replacement equipment.

 

Also, when a student rips the keys of a laptop keyboard/jams a paper clip in an optical drive don't be surprised when your school gets a bill for engineering time & the parts to fix it, and it will probably be sent off to a workshop run by the service provider as schools are unlikely to have staff onsite (or workshop space) to effect a repair.

 

Just ask your SMT how much space there will be for ICT technicians in the 'new' BSF school building....... & wait for the answer......

 

At the moment I share an ex-ICT classroom with two technicians, it's our office, workshop, stores and server room. It is approx 8m x 8m with A/C. In 2-3 years time the 'new' school will be lucky to get a cupboard for toner and another for a rack of servers .

[psydii]

Our Devolved capital for ICT reappears before the end of the five years. Also 30% of our PCs/Laptops will not be replaced initially and 100% of our IWB/projectors and laser printer will move across into the managed service.

Thus at the end of the five years only some (c50%) of the kit will be five years old.

 

For the most part Optical Media is a thing of the past for us, if the kids mash it up - so what? Besides our current 'maintenance due to vandalism' spend is less than the difference between the cost of the higher service level.

 

If I can get onsite FoC repairs from HP/Dell/Lenovo so will any bidder have to who hopes to win our contract.

 

Room space - it could be better, but at least we get a room with a window. The Music Technician gets a cupboard.