The future of IT in UK schools is a subject which pre-occupies me, as any reader of this blog will know already. The reason is quite simple; on one hand we see fundamental changes in the way in which new technology is being used, 'on the streets' as it were and on the other we see an institutionalized attempt to fossilise students' IT into a particular way of doing things (circa 2001) and to peddle this, ad infinitum, to the next generation.

The result has been a near complete disillusionment with school IT by students and teachers accompanied by a near total loss of the desire to upgrade all but the oldest facilities.

This situation is bad for education and near disastrous for UK ICT business.

To illustrate how times have changed, I manned (arm having been seriously twisted) an ICT suite for an Open Afternoon this weekend at an extremely successful Secondary School. Each computer in the suite had a 'test your typing speed' application up and running for visitors to try. For the 3 hours I was there, NO ONE visited the ICT department. Five years ago this would not have been remotely the case. Why suddenly is ICT boring.

Schools control their own budgets but their spend on ICT divides into what they have to do and what they elect to do.

In the former category, directly as a result of the Government’s obsession with collecting data on its citizens, schools, in effect, have to buy into Local Authority compatible databases systems which include the Management Information Systems (MIS) and the new Learning Platforms (LP or VLEs) and a host of other assessment and recording initiatives.

Not surprisingly the big companies (RM, Capita and Serco) fight for these lucrative contracts and the schools pay up reluctantly and sullenly.

Meanwhile, the schools discretionary ICT spending on teaching and learning in the classroom has stalled, actually it's stopped.

Becta officially advises them not to upgrade to Widows Vista and Office 2007 as even if the MOU allowed Microsoft to give it away it would mean upgrading most of the hardware stock to run it.

Becta are also actively encouraging schools to switch to Open Source software through the School's Open Source Software Project (SOSP) in order to save money.

Finally, schools are dissatisfied with the costs and services and responsiveness of their suppliers.

What the above means is the following:

• Schools' spending on ICT is driven by administrative needs, is largely infrastructural and somewhat resented.
• The pedagogical promise of ICT has withered under the oppression of 'Office' key skills; no one is interested.
• Classroom focussed ICT spending has all but stopped with severe consequences for UK computer business.

It may appear to the hapless users stuck with unimaginative products serving deathly boring syllabuses that they are now so firmly under centralised control and that school ICT is in terminal (sorry) decline. However, change can happens from below and I would like to explore this further in the coming paragraphs.

Where change is going to come from.

The Brief (and highly selective) History of Personal Computing

Before the 1980’s computing was a terminal-server model controlled rigidly by managers through all powerful Systems Administrators.

Then along comes a period of anarchy.

ZX81, Atari, Amiga Acorn. We went wild, for the first time an individual could afford a computer of their own.

By the time the Apple Mac and IBM-PC had appeared, seriously useful applications as well as seriously great games were common place.

Back in the office, computing plodded on. Soon though, ambitious (and frustrated) workers were bringing in their own machines from home to do a bit of SuperCalc and goodness knows what else, writing their own programs when it suited, and were busy transforming business, engineering, science and maths.

This was a very creative period indeed, but also it was 'Admin-Hell'. It soon became obvious the 'PCs' were not going away. How do you control all this freedom? Simple, network them.

Networked PCs soon dominated the work place and schools with their spreadsheets and word processors and messaging systems and of course servers and logons and 'permissions' and other security restrictions. Control of IT had been restored to administrators.

Schools, ever the control freaks, fully embraced the computer revolution and soon had their own networks. So what happened to kill interest in IT?

Real School ICT?

Today technology has moved on at a pace and personal devices are once again all the rage. We have seen the mobile phone morph into the 'Blackberry' and the MP3 player into the I-Touch, all of course Web-facing and increasingly relevant to our lives, all unsurprisingly, are deprecated in schools.

To defend this rather harsh assertion, below are a few snippets to show how a student gains marks in ICT examination in the current UK school assessment system and why personal devices are regarded as a pain.

• At GCSE and Key-Skills ICT for example, sending an e-mail with an attachment gains you many marks. In contrast, transferring a video of your teacher throughout the classroom by bluetooth over your phones and uploading it to YouTube with a suitable MP3 soundtrack, will get you suspended or arrested.
• Similarly, layout a document using MS Word, which incorporates set margins, paragraph indents, left and right justification (just like a typist would have done a hundred years ago) and you will be similarly rewarded with good e-skill marks. Spend your time group texting 'R U 4 Animal Rts?' and you'll risk being sent to the Head as an illiterate subversive.
• Searching for Information? School Internet is heavily filtered. You get the content appropriate for young minds. Searching for information within the filter is a little old fashioned. UK Exam boards have still to acknowledge that Alta Vista is not the prime search engine and that you do not have to use boolean operators to find what you want on Google, but if you do, that'll get you extra marks too. Search on your 3G (unfiltered) connection on your personal device and you can look up Ed Balls without it being blocked as obscene. Ok, bad example, but hopefully the point is made.
• Saving and backing up work is emphasised on all exam syllabuses (some still referring to floppies for the purpose) and a screen shot to prove it is essential you gain your CLAIT certificate. I haven't backed up alI year I am ashamed to say. I use Google docs and mail. I just hope they back up stuff and don't read half of it.

So much for school syllabuses and what is and is not rewarded by them, the point is, school ICT is anachronistic, increasingly irrelevant to students and is controlled by 'grown ups' who barely grasp the whole concept.

But on the ground it's all changing and changing fast, all us 'hip dudes' want from our schools/employers in terms of ICT is web connectivity and that's only because the 3g wireless on our personal device is still too costly.

So we are back to the situation when the PC came first came out. Institutional ICT is highly centralised and stultifying.

For fun when I visit classrooms in schools where ‘all’ mobile phones are kept in the students’ lockers (officially) and search for new Bluetooth devices I rarely find fewer than ten. The teachers are (so far) quite unaware of the fact. Amongst the young IT anarchy rules.

The Second PC revolution

Koolu's W.E. phone shown here and the OLPC Mark 2. Although to general chagrin the latter is to be supplied with both Open Source and Windows XP operating systems the new OLPC has two exquisite touch screens, one of which can be a keyboard when required otherwise it can be a two-leaf e-book.

The former, the W.E. phone is powerful enough to be billed as personal computer but uses the familiar format of a 3G mobile phone. Shown here @. http://koolu.com/images/stories/WEphone_builtin_lg.jpg it has a projector and a laser keyboard built in. Development on this project is extremely rapid as the phone uses Google's Open Source operating system Android to control it and the developers have let rip with their imagination.

Combine these two futuristic personal computing devices with the already 'here and now' Open Source netbooks (which I thought were simply amazing 10 months ago) and it is easy to appreciate the coming explosion in personal computing devices.

Open Source software development methods combined with the emergence of powerful new technologies such as ultra-low wattage on chip computers and ultra-sensitive touch screens have unleashed a second personal computing revolution. The result of which is as unpredictable as the first PC revolution.

The next steps in ICT education

Closed knowledge systems merely lead to rumours of 'death rays' and other secret weapons but usually deliver nither. Open knowledge systems where knowledge is shared produce better technologies and science.

It is no surprise that Open Source software arose from the very same academic model for sharing knowledge that empowered the 'free world' (as it was called then) to win the cold war.

Today's young have much higher IQ scores than previous generations. This trend is clear and has been attributed to increased symbol manipulations deriving from computer experiences.

The young are also characterised by an unprecedented addiction to information sharing, whether by social networks or humble text messages.

The outcomes of these changes are unknown. Whether they will merely lead white noise as information and IQ blur into insignificance or whether it heralds a cognitive jump is unclear.

We do know however that the Open Source knowledge model is driving change. YouTube application development is Open Source as are the new NetBooks, as is the Google’s Android operating system on the W.E device above.

We can be sure that the next generation of PCs will change the way we handle information and work together and that the established administrators will view them one again with horror.

That is, of course, until 'they' can find some way to control them; at this point schools will adopt 'new' technologies, meanwhile expect a fight between 'traditional ICT' and real ICT.

Last summer the list of ‘thriving’ UK PC manufacturers contained a very familiar list of players. These were RM plc, Akhter plc, Evesham Computers Ltd and Viglen Ltd.

The industry collectively had concentrated on the public sector market, especially the education sector, since it was becoming clear that retail selling in an ultra cut-throat market was untenable.

The dangers of retail selling were graphically illustrated by the sudden collapse of much loved Evesham computers in late 2007 following Gordon Brown’s axing of the Home Computer Initiative. Their education public sector contracts, which we shall see were being squeezed too, were not sufficient to save them.

This is where it starts to get interesting.

Of the players left, for Viglen, Akhter and RM, times are getting very hard indeed.

RM has posted figures this Spring showing a small profit-to-turnover ratio, despite the successful launch of the Linux EeePC into the education market.

Akhter’s position in fact is very difficult to analyse as they are part of a very diverse engineering group and have strong trade in Pakistan, all of which are making sensible profits. They are ironically in a stronger position to weather any storm than their bigger rivals.

Viglen too currently seem OK due to a strong presence in the server market but they see problems ahead. Their CEO, Bordan Tkachuk of Alan Sugar’s ‘The Apprentice’ fame, sees ‘little appetite for major Vista deployments’ and thinks that the for the education sector the future will lay in the Linux sub notebooks as espoused by RM.

It’s in Bordan’s ‘Vista’ comment that the original conjecture regarding the health of UK PC companies lays.

The trail leads straight back to Becta’s infamous procurement frameworks.

The ICT procurement frameworks are populated by a very select few which in addition to the above companies include the outsourcing specialists Capita and Serco.

Up to about 2005, being on the list was a licence to print money. Schools were very generously funded for ICT equipment and BECTA had signed its memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to ensure that schools used their products.

During these days many of the un-favoured went to the wall, Acorn computers being the most renowned supplier to the education sector.

After 2005 however the situation started to change for the UK PC manufacturers.

Firstly, the rise of cost-cutting outsourcers such as Capita pushed hardware procurement into generic commoditised products making it harder to sell desktop PCs at a profit when badged with RM or Viglen logos.

Secondly, subsidies for school software (the e-credit scheme) came to an end at the same time as did ring-fenced ICT funding for schools.

Thirdly, and this will prove to be the killer blow, BECTA advised schools in 2007 and 2008 not to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007.

The hand that fed the big companies had suddenly decided to throttle them.

A survey of the surviving manufacturer’s product list on their web sites for 2008-9 shows a hint of desperation. RM and Viglen are hovering over a decision to commit to Linux through the netbook market, Akther, RM and Viglen are dabbling with green computing. None show any confidence that they can see the way forward.

Without the upgrade cycle and the subsidised software that built these companies over the past 15 years the money will run out very fast. I expect to hear a few more hard luck stories in the coming year or two.

Once again, it will be hard luck on schools. The likes of Capita and Serco will soon dominate. They are however management companies not innovators. There are no (approved) companies that can take forward the coming Open Source revolution, so it looks like the taxpayer will be left in the hands of the big outsourcers.

Well done Becta in your time you may yet preside over the complete extinction of the UK PC business with one notable exception hitherto unmentioned, Elonex.

The British company Elonex are now shipping their Elonex One, the well-received ultra-low cost sub-notebook running on (of course) Open Source software.

Let’s wish them luck.

The simple answer is 'yes' we could do it now and we will save the taxpayer millions of pounds.

In previous posts I have documented the exponential rise in school ICT costs over the past 20 years. The articles focussed on costing ICT fully. This meant summing the costs of software purchase, software licensing, hardware replacement cycle, support costs and for the first time, electricity costs. The latter now make up 20% of the total ICT spend of a secondary school's £100,000-£200,000 annual total.
 
Missing from the earlier work, for which I apologise, were peripherals such as printers and photocopiers.

My motivation for revisiting the topic  came from finding out that laser printer and photocopiers use identical  technologies and typically draw 1.5 kw when active and 200 watts on standby. As I happen to be working with a secondary school at the moment I was able to investigate further. 
 
The school's electricity cost accruing from printing and photocopying was under £1000 per year at current prices: I confess to a being a little disappointed I had imagined it was more and it did not amount to more than an extra few PCs.
 
The shock came, though, when the total  number of sheets of A4 that passed through plain paper faxes, photocopiers and laser printers were calculated. It came to 4,450,000 per year. Or, in this school, 8,000 copies per child and one copy every 2 secs per year with a total cost of just below £100,000! The entire T5 airport terminal project only produced 8,000,000 copies per year and they ran 24/7.
 
The question was instantly begged 'is this normal for schools?'. It turns out it is.
 
Chosen at random, a City Academy and a few 'bog standard comps' (not my choice of phrase) produce similar numbers of prints as does my test school and have similar bills. To be fair, my  school had 700 students and the others more like 1400, so they are more 'economical'.
 
Simple sums produce scale-up figures for the UK schools, these are: 20 billion prints at 500 million pounds per annum.
 
Let's take a step back. The last 20 years has seen the massive development of ICT in schools from a standing start to a ratio of one computer for every four students. The same period saw the first photocopier in schools and the first laser printer ( I remember carrying our one in ). 

It would seem that the paperless office does not extend to the paperless school. In fact it appears quite the opposite. As ICT costs have grown so have paper related costs. Neither yet show any signs of abating.
 
It does not have to be like this.

Back at the office, (where I work as an ICT consultant) I cannot, hand-on-heart, claim that it is 'paperless'. But truly it is an event when the printer has to be run and usually associated with some cursing. Also, being an Open Source company, we get all of our software as downloads so not much is copied to disc either.
 
Obviously, everyone has a computer (laptops have replaced desktops by choice) and interestingly a notebook and pencil/pen at the ready. We have a library of well thumbed reference books too.  Like us UK secondary schools all have networks and Internet access, but obviously they do not have a computer each.
 
Solution: give everyone one of the new open source netbooks and fully wirelessly connect the campus.  Stop handing out work sheets, printing homeworks and e-mails etc etc, look at a flat screen screen instead.
 
To give every child in the country a new Linux notebook,  would cost less than the annual printout bill.  Within a school the old PC's and all but the web server would wither and die from lack of use (except for specialised applications) thus saving further millions.  No more digital divide, no need for paper and no need for text books (they would all be on the server).
 
Thinking 'is this how it has to be?'  is what really defines Open Source thinking.  The new low cost, low energy computers came out of  possibilities created by Open Source software development. Open Source software itself appeared as if from thin air as a result of thinking 'is this how it has to be, lets change it' 
 
Schools are very conservative, they like to keep on doing what they have always done, and no one likes to think they got it wrong, but does anyone feel in a position to defend school ICT as it is, on a benefit-cost quotient?