Introduction
Naace welcomes the unparalleled level of investment which is being made into secondary education generally and ICT specifically through the BSF programme. Naace also applauds the overarching aim of transforming education rather than merely updating buildings. Many Naace members working in schools, local authorities, national agencies and supply companies are already helping to shape the implementation of this ambitious initiative.
The knowledge that in each area this is genuinely a one-off opportunity which will affect many generations of learners intensifies the concern of Naace members that the BSF programme should fulfil its aspirations completely and that experience of difficulties overcome and successes achieved should be widely shared. Understandably, at this comparatively early stage of such an extended progamme, some of this concern is expressed as anxiety. We hope that this position paper will contribute positively to the ongoing debate about the most effective way to use the resources which BSF has made available.
On 18th July 2008, Naace held a one-day think tank to explore and clarify issues surrounding the role of ICT in the Building Schools for the Future programme. Speakers from schools, local authorities and suppliers provided short inputs representing a range of perspectives to stimulate discussion. It is from the ensuing discussion that this paper is derived.
The second phase of Harnessing Technology, the national e-learning strategy, identifies four key elements in the achievement of a world class, e-confident education system: committed leadership, personalised learning, capable providers, and effective infrastructure. In many ways, these are also the key to successful BSF development and they are components in each of the topics on which we have chosen to focus.
A vision for learning
There is general agreement that successful implementation of BSF originates in a bold and persuasive vision of learning with ICT at its heart. Within the tight timescales of BSF programmes, asking schools to develop a vision of transformed learning supported by ICT can be a formidable challenge. It can be argued that a school or local authority which waits until the BSF process begins has left it too late. There are national expectations in place, with for example, the aspirations of the National Strategies and the developing priorities of Harnessing Technology in place. Similarly, schools which have used the Self-evaluation Framework for ICT will be better placed to think through the opportunities and issues which BSF introduces. Even with these firm foundations in place, Naace believes that leaders in schools and LAS should be encouraged to begin the visioning process at an early stage without waiting for the BSF starting pistol to be fired.
It is one thing to recognise that a vision for learning is needed; producing it can be quite another. Finding suitable language, an appropriate structure, and the right balance of big picture and detail may be difficult. As BSF develops, with more and more players in the field, it would be helpful to have a gallery of vision statements from a wide range of schools and authorities. There is always the danger that someone else’s vision will stifle local thinking, but sharing a number of contrasting models is likely to stimulate fresh thinking rather than lead to imitation. In the early phases of BSF, schools and authorities which experienced difficulties and underachievement were understandably in the majority. In later phases, more participants who consider themselves successful will be entering the programme. In both cases, ready access to a variety of vision statements from around the country will help to provide the challenge to re-think approaches to learning.
Who should be involved in the development of a shared vision for learning on which an ICT strategy can be based? The simple answer of course is everybody: leaders, practitioners and learners. Establishing a debate in which participants are not limited by their previous educational experience requires skill and resources. BSF provides a possibly unique opportunity for dialogue in which schools and local authorities can learn a great deal about the attitudes, opinions and needs of their users. In the field of ICT, this is particularly acute, with a generation of young people routinely using their own technology and unimpressed by pedestrian or restrictive approaches to computing. So, BSF can encourage a debate about the future of learning and the role of technology, a debate which is needed now anyway, with or without the massive investment programme which will re-shape our secondary schools.
A further complication is that the vision of learning and the subsequent provision of ICT must reflect the fact that schools can not operate in isolation. This is partly because their students will increasingly be learning in more than one place in the course of a week, and partly because decisions taken about ICT will affect all the secondary schools in a local authority, and possibly other phases too. Without visionary champions in leadership positions, it will be difficult for all these different strands to be pulled together and it is critical to identify and cultivate them at the earliest possible stage. Naace welcomes the involvement of NCSL in the development of leadership programmes for BSF.
Expertise and capacity
It is readily acknowledged that the BSF process, even in its more recent slimmed down incarnations, is immensely time-consuming for all concerned. The planning and procurement processes involve specialist expertise and levels of detail which are not normally required in school teachers and local authority education advisers. In a number of areas in recent years the advisory function for ICT has been reduced dramatically. One of the many challenges of BSF is therefore the question of capacity within schools and authorities to ensure that the learning agenda remains at the forefront throughout the period of an individual project. Naace welcomes and looks forward to the publication of guidance by Partnerships for Schools on effective staffing models and communications processes.
Even where appropriate expertise exists, the time demanded by the BSF process can monopolise advisers’ diaries to the extent that support for other developments in ICT has to be sidelined, which is regrettable. Over 70 local authorities are now engaged in BSF projects, and many have bolstered their resources by engaging external consultants with experience of BSF. The national programme is now sufficiently advanced for some of these organisations to claim - justifiably - a successful track record in BSF. Nevertheless, appointing the right consultants remains a critical decision for local authorities, and Naace feels that this is an area where guidance would be helpful and valued. A version of the Becta Consultancy Services Framework specifically focussed on BSF could be considered in order to assist authorities who need this form of support.
Naace is also concerned about the expertise and capacity available within the marketplace. We know that a comparatively small number of ICT companies have been successful in tendering for BSF contracts and have been building experience of bidding for, negotiating and implementing the ICT requirements of a LEP. We also know that bidding is extremely costly for suppliers. We have concerns that new entrants to the market may have difficulty in establishing themselves and that the limited number of companies willing to bid may undermine the competitive principles on which the procurement process is based.
Contracts or partnerships?
The relationship between the commercial providers within the LEP and a local authority and its schools is self-evidently critical. We know that clarity and openness from the earliest stages of the BSF process can make a big difference to the quality of that relationship by the time a preferred bidder has been chosen and begins delivery of services. Achieving the right kind of balance between robust contract management and healthy partnership working is not necessarily straightforward. The procurement process itself could be seen as contributing to a tension between these two views of the relationship. On the one hand, a recommended 40% of the evaluation weighting is attached to partnership working. On the other hand, authorities are pressed to detail the minutiae of key performance indicators and service standards before entering dialogue with companies. This is another area where it would be helpful, as BSF unfolds, to have access to case studies which illustrate schemes where an appropriate balance has been struck, with an honest assessment of how that balance was achieved.
As more BSF schemes are implemented, it will also be helpful to share experience about which ICT-related KPIs are most appropriate and useful in achieving the aims of the programme. It is clearly important that ICT resources are available and working as and when they are needed, and KPIs have to reflect this. However, in a mature market, it should be the norm to take availability and reliability almost for granted, and it ought to be possible to rely on the standardised pay mechanism to handle this without a great deal of additional time-consuming input from those involved in planning and negotiation. A straightforward payment and penalty regime provides reassurance to school and authority staff who may have initial reservations about introducing a managed service for ICT; in the longer term it will reflect an impoverished partnership if it is the main focus of dialogue once the scheme is implemented.
There is a temptation to measure only what is easy to measure rather than what is really important. It is notoriously difficult to establish causal links between provision of ICT and educational progress, let alone educational transformation. Naace considers that there is more work to be done in this area. We need to develop KPIs, or even alternative evaluation strategies, which better reflect the priorities of the education agenda without imposing unmanageable burdens on the staff who will have to monitor them and without transferring unacceptable or unaffordable levels of risk to the companies providing services. Since all BSF schemes are concerned with transforming learning, this is an area where sharing experience and collaborative thinking would be valuable, both to schools and authorities and to their partners.
Successful business relationships require intelligent clients. Many authorities are well equipped to manage large and complex contracts. It could be argued that BSF requires a new kind of intelligence, in order to ensure that the ambition and imagination of the original conception are not lost in the detail of contract negotiation and monitoring. This will be the true test of a partnership, and we need to ensure that all participants are equipped to make it succeed.
Change management
Fundamentally, BSF is about change. Change management ought therefore to be at the heart of the process. Naace is pleased that this is recognised within the ICT aspects of BSF and that it is prominent in the current version of the ICT Output Specification. There is some concern that, because of this prominence, the ICT budget can be reduced in order to divert funds into more generic change management. The cultural changes involved in fully exploiting the potential of new technologies in learning, in communicating with and responding to learners in a variety of radically different ways, in seeing a mobile phone or a play station as a learning device, in preparing for e-enabled anytime anywhere learning, all make powerful new demands on the school workforce, and these must be managed using the resources allocated for the purpose.
For most schools, the expectation that ICT support will be provided through a managed service is also a significant departure, and in many areas there may be implications for a local authority support service and for independent providers too. The arguments in favour of a managed service are well understood and increasingly accepted, though there is still a need to support those who may feel threatened by changes in the support regime. Naace considers that part of the change management process should help staff in schools, particularly those with roles in the leadership of ICT, to think through what might be different with a managed service in place and to begin planning on that basis at an early stage.
In ICT, perhaps more than any other area of BSF, school staff are likely to become involved in the TUPE process, and staff in local authority and local independent support services may also consider their positions to be at risk. We know that successful managed services can offer all kinds of opportunities to staff affected by TUPE. Naace recognises that there will be a period of uncertainty and anxiety for these colleagues, which may be demoralising for them and detrimental to the schools they support. It is therefore important that the change management process recognises their needs from the outset, not only providing whatever reassurance is realistically possible but also helping them to prepare proactively for a new phase in their working life which will meet their personal and professional aspirations.
The first topic on which we focussed in this paper was the need for a vision of transformed learning with ICT at its heart. If transformation is to be the means of improving the life chances of our young people, change management should be on the agenda at every stage of the BSF process. Indeed, it could be argued that achieving a shared vision for radical changes in learning and teaching is the first step. ICT is transforming so many aspects of society, almost too quickly for us to perceive what is happening. Despite some remarkable advances and widespread availability of new technology, some aspects of the school system have been surprisingly resistant to change, perhaps because change management has rarely been explicitly addressed. Now the time has come!
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