Ephelyon

True, enjay, there's a sense in which at some schools it will be a losing battle anyway. However, of the two options: a) Listening to one individual member of staff who you don't value anyway, and nobody important is currently telling you that you ought to be valuing them (which is the problem in some places); OR b) Being told by an organisation specifically set up for this purpose that these members of staff do need valuing, as well as how to go about it in a cost-effective manner. I feel b) is more likely. It's true that if people really don't want to listen, then they just won't, but it ought to catch the majority's attention if done properly. I would certainly suggest that one of the primary factors in such an organisation (or branch)'s remit would be to go about their business in a manner that's specifically designed to be "easy listening" for SLTs. As to how to do that, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who would know more about it than I do.

This is lucky for some and unlucky for others; one of the downsides can be that, because they don't realise just how complicated, demanding and responsible your job is, they don't pay you enough for it!

That would probably be great, but as GrumbleDook says, it's been difficult getting them to pay attention to us so far...

I guess in schools it's a question of role allocation. In some, like mine, there's no room for a senior technical specialist and a hands-off strategic manager: they have to be the same person (although in fact the Head is the official lead on ICT Strategy at my place and bears the overall responsibility for that). The problem is that not all schools recognise which role they need. Some might be employing people who are better suited to the hands-off management role, but without enough technical hands-on staff below them to actually make it work. Or they might be employing technical specialists without the co-ordinating management above, assuming the environment is large enough that this is necessary and appropriate, and instead delegating it to some teacher or other who doesn't really understand the issues at hand. I imagine both GrumbleDook and SYNACK are right, but whether or not either approach will work would depend on whether the school deploys its staff effectively - and trains them properly for their roles - and whether Senior Leadership maintains a level of oversight appropriate to the team.

True, that would be a monumental task - could always just start it off though. Nothing to lose there really... As for protesting à la sufragettes... we'd just look silly to the vast majority of the nation, though perhaps it would actually wake some of them up to the seriousness of the issue! xD

I think GD makes a good point. I contracted out the installation of our new WiFi recently (not the technical setup and config of the managed solution, just the physical installation of the APs around the school), not because I can't scrabble around in ceiling ducts myself, but because it isn't a very good use of my time. hardtailstar is giving us some very good examples of the fact that there's just as much diversity within primaries as regards their approach to IT as there is in secondaries. I imagine that establishing professional standards - along with the support and training for the professionals in order to meet them - would be a good way of raising the accountability of (in this case) IT staff to their individual schools. I'm sure there's other work to be done too on that one though.

Agreed, wagnerk, this can be a problem. To be honest, I was more interested in some of the core modules, as the technical side is already within my team's skillset. I was more interested in using a qualification like that to communicate the 'ethos' of working in a school and being responsible for pupils, basic behaviour management (which I believe all staff, support included, should practice as it's never good for the kids to get the idea that there are some things they can get away with in front of one member of staff but not others) and things like that. Many of these things could be quite alien to a professional coming straight into, say, an NM job from working in industry. I agree, AngryTechnician, a more BCS-like than Unison-like approach would be preferable in my opnion...

True, has, that's an issue with my LA as well. They do have a corporate training programme, all the courses on which are free, but most of them aren't at all relevant and the ones that are are of too low a level. Interestingly, on this subject, I'm sure most of us will recall the demise of the TDA at the end of March. The TDA's remit may have focused on teachers, but it also offered development opportunities for school support staff as well, including courses like the SWiS at Levels 2 and 3 (in my opinion, absolutely anyone working in a school ought to be required to complete a Level 2 SWiS qualification - on the job, naturally - within their first year). It was retired with effect from the new financial year and replaced with the Teaching Agency, which deals exclusively with teachers. There was no official announcement as to what would happen to the rest of its remit (i.e. all the other professionals requiring CPD working in schools), so I thought I'd give the new boys a ring in mid-April to find out what was going on with that. Poor bloke on the other end was clueless (in fairness, it almost certainly wasn't in his training as it's not in their remit), but after speaking to a couple of supervisors in a row came back with the answer that their understanding was that support staff training is now within the purview of LAs. What a joke. I rang our HR department to check this and they have no knowledge of it (and they're not bad as HR departments go). So it seems as if, once again, our interests have fallen by the wayside and somebody somewhere up high has just assumed that whatever it is that County Councils are currently doing (i.e. bugger all) will be enough. This is why these threads are important. If nobody else is going to represent our interests, we'll just have to garner the support ourselves. The reason people up top (i.e. central government) are assuming there's nothing wrong is because we're not telling them. We need to tell them.

Indeed, and I believe there's also a very good phrase about mutual back-scratching... so maybe it would be better to do this as support staff in general... Which is not to say people like BCS couldn't give the cause a head-start, while reaping the eventual publicity for doing so if it's successful...

To be honest I'm really not sure whether lobbying the BCS to work with the FITS Foundation to establish their association is the best way forward, or whether lobbying somebody like the LGE to move for a renewed SSSNB-type organisation for all school support staff in general (and then us coming in on the back of that) would work better.

That doesn't have to continue to be true. One of the main reasons it's been true is because we all just sit back and say that.

So there was, though it wasn't specific to educational IT. It could've fought this cause, though, yes, so perhaps bringing it back in a different form is a way forward.

Indeed - this would seem to link in with Becta's old Competencies Framework...

Thanks wagnerk, a very useful idea!

As I started the original thread I'd definitely be up for it! I would be hoping to see collectively-bargained CPD opportunities and a revamp of the current pay/conditions framework, possibly as part of a broader nationwide school support review. Michael Gove's current answer, to either continue with the NJC scheme or to devolve it to individual schools and have done with it, will not work.

Quite so! That's precisely what I'm trying to see if we can achieve here. To get a national qualification and pay/career structure in place (which would be considerably easier if it weren't on its own, but rather part of a broader rethink of school support staff pay and conditions like the SSSNB's original remit included), so that people like Andie and witch can get a better deal and have their interests represented. On the 'representation of interests' score, and because the scale of it would require some leaning much higher up (i.e. central government, or at least local government), I therefore think we might find it interesting to hear from people like BCS. Maybe there could be a deal whereby they'd be willing to make the case as long as those of us who are interested become members, which I for one would be quite willing to do if it would help to make it happen. @GrumbleDook, do you know if there have been any rumblings in that direction of late?

Very true! I suppose the only way to make it work would be to ensure it's all kept inside the public sector and specify that as a core criterion for success when making our various representations.

A good point, witch: on their own, no, they won't bother. They'd have to be convinced from higher-up that this is a good idea and the way to be doing it. In other words, they'd have to be made to. This is why I think we would need to look at making representations to BCS, IET, government people (Ministers for Education and those responsible for the nation's ICT strategy, which apparently does exist), Local Authorities, etc. That's the only way it would work. We would have to establish recognition of our cause and links with more important people and bodies first. Some members of this forum do have contacts up there I believe.

* True, it's very hard, and therefore, by definition in this case, it's unlikely to come from the internal ancillary staff. If you do try telling your Head that, they'd probably just think you weren't a team player or some other rubbish, which is ludicrous as the whole point is that we are recognising the whole team, not just the part of it doing the service delivery. It's like in my analogy further back: the people making (and, in fact, designing and selling) the furniture are doing the service delivery, but that company still wouldn't view its HR department as existing solely to support them; they exist to support everyone. This is like IT, because we exist to enable everything. * Indeed, that may be the overall purpose of their existence, but there is a subtle distinction between the purpose of something's existence and the be-all-and-end-all of its existence. As in our case, the system needs to be up and available even during the 25% of the year when there is no teaching and learning going on, so that tells us that actually it's there specifically to enable other things as well. Of course, I'm not saying that IT is not here to facilitate teaching and learning... I'm just saying that it's here to do that plus the same thing for many other core and ancillary functions as well. The problem with this relentless focus on T&L is that everything else gets forgotten, especially when school leaders often can't relate (understandably) to anything except the T&L in the first place. Schools often prioritise by exclusion of everything else, whereas they ought to start off with a balanced view of all processes and functions and then apply extra focus where necessary, while making sure this doesn't knock anything else out of the picture. If that means they can't prioritise the T&L as much as they would like, that's tough. They'll have to do better in other ways. * Yes, true, the money is a problem here, but to be honest I'd have thought that if the school cluster pools all its available money for IT provision and staffing and this is viewed as a single unit, they'd end up making savings between themselves as they're sharing knowledge, experience and talent (not to mention salaries!)... this is also the kind of direction that Michael Gove has hinted schools ought to be going down in other areas, so he might be receptive to this kind of idea in principle. * This is what the education sector needs to realise now. Gradually, over the past couple of decades (in industry), IT has become a core business function in itself, by virtue of the fact that it now has its own concerns that are self-generated. This is because it has had to start meeting the needs of multiple different departments, whose priorities may be perpendicular to one another (accessibility versus security, to take a common one). Consequently, the department, in collaboration with upper management to ensure compliance with corporate protocols and visions, then needs to generate its own service provision that meets as many of these needs as possible as effectively as possible, because only it (as opposed to the other departments individually) hears all of the disparate needs and concerns together. This means it is now a process both in and of itself. Meeting the needs of one department = supporting it, plain and simple. Meeting the needs of all departments... now that's a separate function because you have to unify everything together under one flag. Education now (as opposed to 10 years ago) uses its IT in the same way that a medium business does, and I mean in exactly the same way. So now (and only in terms of its IT provision), it needs to start working to the standards established by the sector that bore the technology in the first place and knows how to manage it properly: business. Even healthcare's grasped this one.

alttab and SYNACK, I agree. There are some schools where an outsourced solution in one area, or indeed outsourcing all the IT, will work and work well, though I tend to find this is the minority. In my school I do most of the jobs that I'm aware other local schools have outsourced (such as the Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 upgrade, moving to virtualisation, e-mail platform upgrades, etc.), because I have that skillset myself, but then again I currently outsource something as simple as our projector repairs (to a very competitive provider in fairness) as I don't have that skillset myself or within my team. As alttab says, it's a hotchpotch of skills in schools. This is perfectly understandable when you look at the circumstances though: because schools often don't employ people in separate IT roles with separate specialisms, you end up with the particular (i.e. specialist in whichever direction) skillset that the NM and the techies have acquired in IT so far. Absolutely nobody knows everything about IT, and businesses know this (and have the money!) so they employ multiple people with varying skillsets. This is why I started off with talking about a general training programme covering what it is that schools actually need from their technical staff in terms of skills. Entering education with a sysadmin skillset, I was rather surprised to discover a projector sitting on my desk waiting for repair one morning back in the beginning. I've never explored that side of IT (or, in fact, AV) technologies as - after all - what 3rd-line systems engineer will be spending any time resoldering printer or projector components? Or even, in a larger enterprise, dealing with users at all for that matter? In schools, all or most of the roles to be found in a medium-sized business do exist in terms of IT: support analyst, desktop engineer, sysadmin, physical networking, web designer (sometimes), database admin (for when SIMS/PARS cocks itself up and needs manual SQL adjustments to hold its hand), hardware engineer (for that nasty internal sparking a projector will make when it's showing signs that it really shouldn't be in the immediate vicinity of 30 kids), etc. True, the actual workload for most of these roles simply isn't sufficient to employ all these people individually, but then that means you end up with a small team (or in my case, just me as there's myself and an apprentice) that has whatever skillset they happen to have acquired so far, trying to do everything. This is why it can sometimes go wrong and why the school may end up outsourcing something. The problem is that, just because you might only have to fiddle with one area once a year, say, the skillset you need to do it is the same as if you had to fiddle with it once a day! And this is the problem. I do think the current trend needs to reverse. I believe we need to move secondary education towards a different ethos for their IT staff, whereby all or most of the projects required can be handled in-house. We could then adopt an approach for primary education whereby a local secondary will have a cluster of primaries that it assists in this manner - it may charge them something for this but nothing like what an external supplier would charge. Naturally this would only be the case for primaries without in-house technical support or where the support skillset needs supplementing - which is by no means true of all of them! I'd imagine that, in order to achieve this, some changes would be required: * First, nationally raise the salary level of school IT posts in general, to a level where all of us are actually valued for what we do on the paycheque, plus when we move on the school might get someone else in who can actually do the job, instead of just starting again with a new boy as many do; * Second, nationally implement something similar to the modular training programme I described in my OP, so that any missing skillsets within the team can be supplemented; * Third, locally agree school clusters for mutual support - and I do mean mutual, because primary techies have innovations to offer a secondary environment as well, as others have said; * Fourth, nationally cease the view that everyone who is not a teacher is "merely supporting teaching" as, particularly for the NM, that isn't what the bulk of the actual work involves at all, thereby raising recognition of the fact that IT facilities nowadays are in many cases not just supporting a business process any more, they are that business process! * Fifth, reminisce at length about the time when we needed EduHobnobs... Actually, looking at it, that's probably in the wrong order. It's also very pie-in-the-sky as I wouldn't have much in the way of ideas as to how to go about some of it (though I do about the rest). But maybe, if anyone else agrees, someone else does? BCS?

I think GD's right; there's a mix of talents required across the primary and secondary skillsets and my original proposal was every bit intended for primary techies as for secondary techies. Looking back though, I probably didn't make that very clear as my more recent experience is entirely in the secondary sector (only done contract techie work in primaries before and that was getting on for a decade ago now). With that in mind then, Andie, can you tell us any more about specific problems for primary techies that I missed?

Overall, I can't agree I'm afraid, Andie. You're right, of course, in that we should all remember what a school exists to do, teachers and non-teachers (*washes mouth out*) alike. However, I invite you to consider this analogy. Schools, businesses, hospitals, charities, governments and militaries are all organisations (I don't consider the terms 'organisation' and 'business' to be synonymous). Let's say we have an organisation that, for the sake of argument, is a business. Say it makes furniture (like a cut-down version of DFS, perhaps). That's its primary purpose and what it's there to do. There's no point in it being there if it's not doing that. Also, for the sake of simplicity, let's say it has one factory with one production line (naturally it would be more complicated than that, but this is just a simplification of the process). If the factory workers aren't making the furniture, the business is producing nothing and serving no-one so it may as well shut down. But let's assume that we're not at the point of saying the company is folding. The production of furniture comes under the category of 'service delivery'. As an organisation (any kind of organisation), it has to keep itself running in order to have that factory, that production line and those workers there at all. A number of important functions and processes go into this: leadership, administration, public relations, personnel, finance, IT, etc. (IT is part of these because it is a core resources that nigh-on everybody has to go through to get anything done these days). There are also a number of additional functions that facilitate the service delivery, such as sales and marketing to raise public awareness of the existence of the company's products/services (otherwise the company would have no customers, or in a school's case, no pupils/parents) - this is slightly different from PR in general because it's more specific. So let's imagine that you have a nice young lady - Sonya - who works in HR for the company. She might be, say, a team leader (i.e. 'lower-middle' management within that department). Now... you go and try to tell Sonya that all she's there to do is support the factory workers in making the furniture, and she'll tell you where to go, because that's not the be-all-and-end-all of her job at all. She and her department function 'at the level of the organisation', in that they provide a service that enables an organisation composed of human beings to function together collectively as a cohesive whole. They provide their service across the entirety of the organisation, intertwined with all other organisational processes. This is because all the departments contain employees - people - so they will all encounter, and make use of, HR's services at some point. The people carrying out the service delivery element are just one group of these. Next (and this goes out to all those schools whose NMs are still under the Head of ICT), you try telling Sonya that she's to be line-managed by the factory foreman, and she'll quit. In short order. Because it doesn't work like that. Her work and the factory foreman's work are entirely unrelated. Yes, he and his department are one of her clients - a principal client in fact - but that's all. When things are run properly, service delivery is not at the heart of the organisation. There is no 'heart', no single unwavering focus at the expense of all others, that said others all merely serve. All departments are recognised and treated equally in their contribution to the company's success. End of analogy. The same principle applies to IT: no modern organisation of any considerable size (and schools are, generally fitting quite neatly within the industry bracket of 'medium business', at least if it's a secondary school) can function without it, and it permeates absolutely everything. Even the caretakers and the kitchen staff have computers at my school (and yes, they do use them in their work). Even subjects like Art and PE make fairly heavy use of IT resources in many schools. Administration (including a good proportion of clerical duties) is practically paralysed if the whole network goes down, as is finance. Personnel, too, stores employee records and salary adjustments, etc., on SIMS or something else IT-related, or it links in (over the Internet) to a centrally-managed system at the LA's end. The problem this thread was meant to address is one of perception. When dealing with perceptions, terminology and use of language are important. Teachers are used to having assistants in various roles to support their work directly, known variously as 'teaching assistants' or 'technicians' (for certain subjects requiring additional technical support or expertise). You get Art technicians, Science technicians, D&T technicians and so forth. As I said in my OP, there was a time when a school's IT facilities were primarily used as a learning resource; the technical staff were thereby quite fairly classed as supporting teaching. Teachers are used to the idea that when we speak of 'support', be it 'support staff', 'supporting teachers' or whatever else, what this essentially means is people who are subsidiary to teachers, whose roles exist merely to assist in service delivery - i.e. just one element of the organisation. Within the context of education, I feel that that's what the word 'support' is generally taken to mean. We really mustn't blame them for this - that's still the case for many kinds of support staff, and in fairness that was also how it used to be with IT. However... this has changed! The change has been gradual, as schools slowly, over many years, came to rely on their IT services more completely (à la businesses, and frankly everyone else out there by now), so it's not really been noticed. It is up to us to inform and feed back to senior school leaders and senior government decision-makers, including related sector bodies (i.e. BCS) and training companies (e.g. QA) the nature of these changes, as we are likely to be the only group that will perceive them directly over the course of time. Nowadays, the IT resources permeate much further into the core of the school's processes - into pretty much all of them, in fact, including those entirely unrelated to delivering T&L. The ones that continue for that entire quarter of the year when there is no T&L going on. This change has occurred largely over the course of the latter half of the roughly 15 years that IT has been around in schools in its modern (or at least semi-modern) form. I feel it might be useful to compare ourselves with school Business Managers at this stage: they also function 'at the level of the organisation', providing the core service of finance plus, varyingly, a number of other very high-level organisational management functions that are absolutely essential to keeping the school as an organisation running (which must be the case before we can even speak of T&L). They are also generally classed as Senior Management, which, in fairness, I can see they would need to be more than we would. But either way, their position was created, recognised and appropriately paid (generally on par with various similar-ish roles in industry) because a group of people, or perhaps many disparate groups, realised the need for them and the value of them. We have seen, then, that it's possible to influence the education sector in this way, as it's happened before with the rise of the Business Manager. Now is the time for the rise of the Network Manager, and their technical staff. So in summary, Andie, I think you're right in that supporting teachers and pupils is a very important part of our role and it should never be forgotten or put down. Equally, however (and this is the problem), it is only part of our role. Also, as you say, it's easier to swallow the pill if you're working in a place that does value and respect you, and tells you so (I can relate, as mine does too). Unfortunately, however, too many of our colleagues are not in this position, and I feel it is precisely because our role is seen as merely supporting others that we don't get the recognition that, as a branch of our profession, we do deserve. The pool of talent and dedication on this forum is immense. We ought to at least be able to make some headway if we really try. This is also why I wanted to hear from @Dos_Box, as he already knows what it is to achieve change, in indirectly bringing us all together.

*Volunteers* My own thoughts on this idea are currently with the Business Development Managers at QA to see if they might be interested in collaborating on such a training course. Not that the scope of change should be limited to just training. bossman is right to suggest that, either way, we need to keep our feet firmly on the ground here. From my point of view though, I'd rather be trying than not trying. If we don't get anywhere, at least we gave it our best shot. Just re-read that and realised how clichéd it sounded! You get what I mean though.

What about doing something about it, along the lines of what's been discussed above? I'm not labouring under the delusion that it will be easy. Equally, however, I'm not labouring under the delusion that it would be impossible. It seems the problem is more that nobody's interested in doing it.

Indeed... so what can we do about it?