Managed Services in UK Schools

How not to really banjax school ICT

On a visit to a well run school ICT department this week I suddenly 'got' what the major issues are that are besetting school ICT. It's not that I didn't know that these were issues before, it's just that there is nothing like a real debate to bring it home to you.

These issues are, as one would expect, the result of the government's billion-pound dictats and involve two projects. First is the great Learning Platform debacle and second is the Managed Service scam. Both are compulsory, neither are popular...

Learning Platforms

There is no need to go into this in detail again. Everyone has to have one, vendors are falling over themselves to lock Local Authorities into their products, none are compatible with any other, and Oftsed says virtually no-one is using them.

The problem is, ostensibly, that there is no content.  Thanks to the North West Grid for Learning there soon will be through the National Digital Resource Bank, a project which will back-end all LPs. This is truly A GOOD THING (TM). The real problem though lays with human nature.

A Human is  a most cooperative, trusting, helpful, suspicious, competitive, selfish, paradox of a creature and there is as a result a simple rule for those who pretend to governance: 'don't go against the grain of human nature'. We all, seriously, all, have a 'what's in it for me?' process running in the background all the time doing a kind of virtual book keeping. The 'what's in it for me?' question is always begged, if only subconsciously.

This is not as crude as mere selfishness  or greed for  cash. In fact unless you work in a bank this sort of acquisitiveness is quite unusual. For some, a nod of genuine acknowledgement is sufficient reward for massive generosity... ask any Open Source developer (or parent for that matter).

The second grain that should not be rubbed against is the loss of control and freedom to be able to act as you wish. Many studies have shown time and time again how powerlessness deeply affects humans, producing clearly measurable  effects on physical and mental health, not to mention reduced life spans.

Not then for nothing is our company motto 'control through freedom'. More of which later, but dealing with Learning Platforms first - the  'grain-violation' here is the 'what's in it for me? question.

Schools have a huge turnover of staff. The Independent Sector actually aims for 10% per year and in some parts of the maintained sector it  exceeds 20%.

Why then would a teacher invest time and energy  creating content for their students and uploading it to the corporate LP, when most likely within 4 years they will have moved on? The school has had the benefit of their work but they themselves can no longer can access it. You can also pretty much guarantee that re-instating their source material (if they kept it) at the new school will not be simple since it will be on a different and mutually incompatible system!

What's in it for me to upload the LA's LP, in which I have no stake when I leave, with my thoughts, materials, inventiveness, assessments? The answer is nothing, nyet, nada. So it won't happen...

Managed Services

Originally I was going to draw up a list of managed service suppliers who will 'look after' school ICT (as out-sourcing is mandated for all UK schools) and collate the projected price increases which followed, but I soon gave up. There are so many companies out there touting their services, most of which I had never heard of. In the end, drowning in unknowing-ness I almost thought that RM was a good bet until I gave myself a good kick and woke up.

Perhaps, instead, the next two paragraphs gleaned from helpful Government sponsored web sites say enough to give you the flavour and the shivers; they are both case studies:

1) 'Suppliers were approached through the company providing the building work. The school liaised closely with the local authority to shortlist and agree on a final provider....

...the eventual supplier had, at that point, relatively little experience in the education sector.

The overall spend on ICT has increased in line with the school’s vision for ICT but costs are now much more predictable.

Furthermore, the head teacher believes that the service provider has more leverage when negotiating prices on new equipment.

2) 'To increase efficiencies and get the best value from existing staff skills, school ICT staff must be empowered to redirect their focus from intricate technical details to maximising the benefits of using ICT for the purposes of teaching and learning.'

No comment, it speaks for itself. There are loads of examples like this.

Anyway, as I said at the start of the article, a lively debate was had at the school I was visiting. They were troubled by the outsourcing directive, deeply so.

Why? Because the school ICT department was dynamic, visionary and technically competent, that's why! They had just visited a school not dissimilar to those case studies who have outsourced and returned deeply depressed. Paraphrasing some of the content in the case studies will summarise their feelings:

'Economies of hardware purchasing power' or similar translate into 'this is the kit we are giving you, ok its a gas-guzzling pile of poo, but we are off -loading it from our mates cheap so shut up'.

'Technical focus redirection' meant 'don't touch the stuff you unwashed technical layabout, just go unblock the printer there's a good boy'.

You get the picture, a classic case of loss of both freedom and control.

It will of course be a very expensive, very demoralising, state-directed ICT disaster (as usual) in the making. Sadly just another to add to the long list.

All of this can be avoided. Managed Services are not evil in themselves, merely open to abuse by unscrupulous vendors and naive school management teams. Third party support can be empowering, it can free up time and resources that otherwise would be spent on trivial tasks.

They key phrase for schools is 'control and freedom'. It must never be sacrificed for what is only to common in imposed solutions, 'expedience and convenience'.

Summary

Government projects in education fail because they are conceived 'top down' by bureaucrats who forget that they have to be made to work by humans on the ground. When you set systems against the grain of human nature you fall into the totalitarianism trap - in consequence failure at some point in the future is all but guaranteed...sound familiar?