I am involved with a school going through BSF. About six months ago, we explored this option and were advised (informally I think) that such applications were being discouraged, and no school in BSF had actually made a successful case despite several applications having been processed. Both the facts and the policy may have changed in the meantime, of course.

My advice would be to seek very specific advice from PFS and others on this before committing large amounts of time to a proposal. In particular I'd be looking for guidance on the scoring of proposals and the implicit and explicit critical success factors without which no application could succeed. If I recall correctly from the time we were considering it, the bar was being set very high in some areas which wouldn't be immediately obvious to a school preparing a proposal.

Needless to say, OSS is being used within BSF ICT provision, Bradford LA being one example, but no doubt there are others.

Best of luck - please let us know how you get on!

John

I know of at least one school that did a successful "opt out". It's certain that you will be advised against but if you can show better value for money and you are prepaed to shout about it, it's rather difficult for them to stop you. They don't want schools to break ranks but equally they don't want headlines that say "Government bureaucracy vetoes school attempt to save money" just before a general election. If you are certain of the case and have the time to collect the evidence especially with an election coming up, you do have some chance.

If I were you, I would concentrate on building a case for your solution rather than a case against the LA and their ICT provider. Simply use them as a reference and show why your solution gives clearly better value and meets all the relevant criteria. You must be meticulous in demonstrating compliance with the criteria or you give them a reason to reject your solution.

I may be missing the point here, or perhaps it is specific to one LA, but there is nothing in BSF that says that opensource cannot be used.

In all the projects that I work on there is a general expectation that opensource should be used wherever appropriate. The one caveat to this is usually the central services and this is only because no one has come forward yet with a commercially sensible, educationally effective opensource solution that will take into account the rigorous Key Performance Indicators set out within the BSF contract. These KPIs often drive companies away from opensource as they are worried about potential penalties.

Most BSF companies - want to keep schools happy and moving forward but where there is a conflict in nearly all cases the school will win - in one case I know of the school made the provider uninstall their software and replace the software the school had been using. It needs a strong Head and an equally strong and knowledgeable LA but it can be done.

I would also caution going down the opt-out route. I do not know of many schools that can achieve this - there is a lot to go through and I would spend my efforts making the BSF provider work for YOU.

Andrew

We were a long way down the road to an Alternative Case but unfortunately the finance for our school build was not found and in current circumstances is unlikely to reappear for at least 5 years. At the same time we were put under a great deal of pressure to join the managed service despite the lack of BSF.

The points made included
1) As a successful school we would make the contract more attractive to suppliers.
2) It would be so much better if all the schools used the same software. I have to say that one is trotted out quite a lot by LGFL and why on earth software uniformity should be seen as such a positive is beyond me!
3) You have to use a Becta framework LP. That is wrong in every sense you can think of and yet it is widely used by LAs to shoe horn schools into office DM systems that have been re-badged as a LP. OSS does not have to be procured because the software does not have a price. The case has to come from "best value'.

I could go on.

Anyway, we do not have to make an Alternative Case yet however I did read and study a great deal about it.

Here are some initial pointers from my work.

1) If the LEP/LA contract for earlier wave schools has not delivered, it does not improve your case. This is because so far as PFS is concerned the reason is that the LA did not procure properly or there is a material breach of contract. In either case, the fact of a poor early wave procurement does not have any effect on their case for managed services for all. They have been completely convinced of this need by a combination of factors including a large amount of input from "Industry partners".

2) You need to have your current systems professionally assessed and signed off by an appropriate IT professional. Assuming you have a set of systems in place, this will cost a thousand or so. I have such a person in place for us. If yiu do not have a setof systems then get the advice and get them in place.

3) You need legal advice to audit your case and look at your paper work carefully. They would also present your case if you wanted them to. This needs to be a professional in the right field. A high street practitioner from the governors is unlikely to have the right skill set and you need a large regional firm or a national firm. This will be fairly pricey but without it I would reckon you have little chance of successfully making a case. (I assume you have looked at the process and seen how rigged it is.). For instance, one reason for rejecting cases is that schools have not properly considered transfer of risk. An understanding of business risks and project management issues like this is likely to be expertise you need to buy in. If you look at the costs of managed services, it is worth investing some money in an attempt to avoid them "relieving you of the burden of procurement etc". They certainly seem to be relieving schools of the burden of their money, anyway.

4) You have looked at the time scales? They are tight and the process (effectively) gives the LA the last word.

There is lots more but this is just a forum.

Thanks for your helpful comments. Even though you are not needing an APBC, I am looking to partner with other schools that are using OSS to share the costs(ie time) of supporting these packages and reduce risk by proving that there is a genuine community process in developing an OSS infrastructure in schools. We also use Facility/Eportal very heavily, and I think your school does as well? We are already working with two other schools to further develop the Moodle/MIS/Active Directory integration as per our case study on this site.

I was previously an enterprise architect at BT Syntegra before joining Education as an IT Manager. But I agree that getting third party sign off, is going to be important. I have already flagged to the Head that we will need to legal support on our bid team

I did send an email to your school, as I would like to try and setup a meeting with you if possible. I am not wanting to share too much of our strategy on a public forum.

Many Thanks,

I have been in the game long enough to remember when you could not spend more than 50 quid without LA permission and our services were all on contracts negotiated with the LA by contractors. The result was almost universally poor. Hence the creation of the LMS system. (Local Management of Schools). Since then, we have taken premises, catering and cleaning in-house in the face of opposition from the LA and we have never looked back.

The catering contract used by Steve Moss (here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/bsf/5971-bsf-email-steve-moss.html) is a useful comparator. In our case, the procurement and contract was no doubt a thing of great beauty but the food was swill being eaten by students with their fingers out of expanded polystyrene bowls. No doubt nutritionally balanced swill out of sterile containers at the appropriate temperature but it was swill nevertheless. The problem with the centrally negotiated contract was the fact that the consultants-managers-advisors.... etc etc had no real commitment to make the system really work on the ground. We have won awards on food since we took it in-house chiefly due to belief and commitment from the staff involved. IMHO, similar issues apply to managed service ICT contracts

Maybe you are correct about a properly setup contract but the PFS process does not involve the school in the technical part of the contract until it is too late. We create a Output spec in educational terms and the contract supplies the necessary sw and hw. The wishes of a school are watered down by all the other schools in the area. Regardless of what the 'local choice' fund allegedly allows, all the fundamentals of the system are done and dusted by the time any local choice happens. For example, the creation of a local data warehouse which is a key piece of vendor lock-in that shapes so much in many contracts. The limits of the options for OSS because the provider can simply say no to many things the school may want to do and point to aspects of the contract that allow them say no. The problem here is the whole ethos of OSS (which is that the user can adapt the sw to their own use.) is almost exactly contrary to the outsource model of the managed service.

An excellent example is the misunderstanding that some LAs and advisors seem to have about what a framework contract is and why it exists. A practical effect of this misunderstanding is that OSS is written out of the options for learning platforms.

I have friends working in several countries with both centrally managed education and without and those with the central management t envy the autonomy that LMS gave us. BSF is rolling that autonomy back and no good will come of it. Local control is not peculiar to England and to be honest, in the public sector we are continually being told by politicians of all shades, how we should emulate the private sector. One key difference (amongst many) between the public and private sector is in the degree of autonomy schools have.

If the LA provides a good service then schools will buy in. We buy in many excellent services from the LA. For example, legal services. In the case of ICT, the BSF process does not allow schools to see in any detail, what they are buying until after they have committed, this has led to market failure in terms of quality of service.

An underlying idea behind the way this process was designed is that IT in schools has been run by a bunch of amateurs and needs to be taken over by professionals. The 'professional' systems being used in some areas do not give me any confidence that this is a good process for procuring ICT.

If the managed service provided processor power and networking on tap where the use of them was the choice of the teacher in the classroom then that would be good. However the situation in at least one major BSF contract is that schools are ignoring the provided software and purchasing cloud based services in part because that is the way they can avoid having to go through the complex process of having locally processed software installed.

To summarise, you are right, there is a conflation of these two issues but that conflation is created by the PFS/BSF process.

I posted a comment on video but here it is again:

Think the guy from a CLC has a great point RE innovation coming from individuals.Great to hear a familiar voice in Mark Chambers, very impressed Mark made it down to OSS conf, proves Bradford are willing to sit down and talk about BSF openly :)

Interesting about PFS being able to listen better than BSF contractors, is the message here to get PSF to review current infrastructure and relay a report onto BSF?

Wish there was clarity on whether a BSF school (including primary) can download and install software without an argument or contract change?

We've done loads of new build primary school ICT deployments, We don't need to be the size of RM.. I don't think you need a big player. We only employ 20, the thing is our 20 staff are purely focused on schools. I agree with the guy who spoke after the guy RE: RM.

I guess my architects have always been great, none of them have been BSF contracted architects though as far as I'm aware.

There are loads of small, specialist companies around, why don't RM just buy them when they win a contract?

Wish sound quality was a bit better but I'm not complaining!

Quick update.

We met with PfS and our LA last week.

Basically, PfS will only work with a school that agrees to work within the LA management of the BSF process. So we will have to undertake all work to support our APBC under our own steam and our own money!

I am learning a lot more about the BSF funding process and I am working on a cost model and an executive summary of the BSF funding process.

Tim