First, thanks for organising the LA day at Bletchley Park. As LA strategic lead for ICT, I guess I am one of the target groups the day was aimed at, I wondered if you'd mind me dropping a couple of thoughts into the community?
In order to increase adoption, should OS be 'marketed' to three different stakeholders in different ways?
1. Teachers want free resources and applications, but often need simple plain english information and a recognition that they are comfortable with Windows. OS enthusiasts often put teachers getting involved because they seem to 'know so much' (Geeks). Most teachers have little if any choice over their network OS, so getting into which distro of Ubuntu / Red Hat or talking about ISO's etc. is lost on them and is a barrier at the entry level. Should OS Schools have a dedicated teacher section that keeps it simple? Teachers who become OS application enthusiasts move things forward in schools.
2. Network managers and technicians are interested in infrastructure, and therefore a key target for starting to move forward with Linux, virtualisation and OS desktops, but it is going to be out of the comfort zone of many. Is this another dedicated community? As far as I am aware, no school has yet achieved the Becta ICT Mark with OS networking and desktops. This needs to be achieved! School leaders may be interested in value for money but rely heavily on their technical leads!
3. LA ICT leads make decisions on infrastructure and need access to specialist developers / consultants in order to become familiar with what can and can't be achieved within the context of wider childrens services, interoperability data security and interoperability standards. Becta needs an approved list of OS consultants, and in my opinion we need access to a community that is willing to move our knowledge level up a gear so we can see what is possible. An arrogant bunch, we don't like geeks taking the mick when we ask dumb questions and we are largely Windows people ... make us look like idiots and we revert back to comfort zones.
As a comment, it would be helpful to have access to a forum where we can set out requirements and project proposals in functional terms and where developers can respond so we can share costs and explore models for return on investment.
By the way, I'm not afraid to say I had a 'penny-drop' moment when Miles (I think?) pointed out that massively multi-user deployments (Google etc.) would be unbelievably expensive with licensed software. Obvious now, but scalability is cheaper with free licenses. When I look at the bills for cals etc.
I wasn't able to attend the Bletchley event but I would like to respond as I think the points raised are key to getting greater participation.
Point 1. Lower barriers to entry and provide transition routes. eg web based resources that require no installation and can be run using existing infrastructure from any standards compliant browser. Moodle is an example but it is relatively complex to learn compared to say a game in Java script We need more open source web based resources that incidentally educate people about open systems, not just Open Source. So can Open Source Schools seed development and publicise these? Conferences are useful but teachers need easily accessible applications they can use without hassle to encourage them to take the next steps. We want initial reactions to be Hey this solves some problems for me immediately, what can I do to get more?
Point 2.Changing infrastructure is much, much more difficult. Before you can change these things the stakeholders need educating (not training! That comes second). They need to understand why the pain of change is worthwhile and they need to be able to communicate that effectively to those that control the resources. Since BECTA has been very slow at supporting such things - £130k on a schools open source project might be a start but it is really a drop in the ocean compared to 500 million on COL reinforcing entrenchment - why would a school sys admin, think they can do it better with no resources? EduGeeks already has a quite strong grass roots group that includes a lot of interest in FOSS. Probably supporting a SIG in that community for FOSS would be most effective than trying to reinvent the wheel.
Point 3. The Open Source Consortium of companies would love to engage with LAs. They are small companies and any bureaucratic overhead such as BECTA procurement frameworks etc is going to put a big barrier between them and getting involved. There is also OSS Watch but they are really HE focussed. Nevertheless there is a wealth of expertise motivated to help. These people really are committed beyond just doing it a a job but they still have mortgages to pay. The snag is that the way government works (local and national) the bureaucracy of dealing with it could bankrupt a small business. If I spend days going through procurement procedures I'm not working and not earning. Large companies can statistically even this out, small micro businesses can't yet they can usually do things much less expensively *if* they get a chance. Look at BECTA's initial procurements in the FOSS field. They have generally engaged those that they believe to be "safe" not those with the best knowledge and experience in a particular field. This same "risk aversion" is likely to be found in most government organisations particularly if the decision makers have a weak understanding of FOSS. Again a barrier to change with learning at its heart. The SOSP could have some sort of peer vetting service for FOSS consultants that is light touch and avoids the usual bureaucracy but I'm not sure how BECTA would see that in terms of the project remit. In general FOSS communities peer review contributors but to do that you have to be engaged in those communities perhaps for years. This is another aspect of FOSS that government has failed to understand.
It has always seemed ironic to me that the education industry never seems to find solutions to its problems in education. Learning is always good for someone else. It seems that the preference is to try and "buy" fixes with procurement strategies rather than real investment in learning. It's not that hard to modify the curriculum to reflect the contemporary changes in the global software industry and still meet statutory requirements. £50k for every hour of the NC from 5-16 (in every subject not just ICT) was spent on COL. Think if that money had been spent on FOSS web based apps and coherent courses providing progression routes through NC levels and free to all schools (in the world). All of a sudden the brand name on the infrastructure doesn't matter as long as it is open systems complaint, teachers can learn alongside pupils, the only training needed is how to use a web browser. LAs and government can help speed this up or slow it down but eventually it is where all the trends seem to be heading.
For my money (I am a tax payer) the missing piece is the requirement that to qualify for BECTA or any other government endorsement, a supplier MUST demonstrate support for the open source ecosystem as well as at least one proprietary ecosystem.
I would love to see some real figures, but I suspect there are at least 25 million Windows client operating systems licensed in our homes, 12 million in our schools and other public services and 15 million in the private business sector. Most of these have Microsoft Office, most of the remainder have Microsoft Works, and the few that remain ship with one version or another of OpenOffice.org. For far too many people at all levels, the foundation of the computing ecosystem is Microsoft.
The direct cost of production of these licenses is pennies; we ship out billions of pounds of foreign exchange in every replacement cycle. The very least the government could do to help itself is to ensure that the next generation of computer users know that there is a choice, and know enough about the different (eco)systems to make an informed choice from amongst them. If we then choose to ship billions oversees to preserve our essential infrastructure, at least we will know why.
Brian Lockwood
Curriculum online, was at http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk/
You must remember the eLearning credits. A cunning means to channel public funds to the software and content industry. Some of the content was good, perhaps not as good as BBC and Wikipedia, but not bad. Much of the content was pretty unsatisfactory IMHO. Very Skinnerist. Despite the rigorous evaluation process it had been subjected too. I look forward to the no doubt significant improvement the new digital content ecosystem will bring to this area. This is not to be confused with NWLG's NDRB, which is teachers, schools and LAs sharing content already generated through public funding with one another.
Back at BETT 2006, I wanted to have a banner on the Moodle stand saying 'eLearning Credits not accepted here".
Curriculum online, was at http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk/
You must remember the eLearning credits. A cunning means to channel public funds to the software and content industry. Some of the content was good, perhaps not as good as BBC and Wikipedia, but not bad.
The question is whether this was a good way to spent £50k to support each hour of the statutory curriculum? It would have been hard to do a worse job of obtaining value for money. To reply to DrC, while BECTA and the DCFS treat a monopoly as if it was a free market I doubt we will see any real leadership in changing the status quo. Probably the best we can hope for is that they stay out of the way and don't keep making things worse. There is an underlying assumption in all the purchasing frameworks that software is always procured through buying licenses and so that is how the government targets public money ensuring the lion's share of investment goes straight into reinforcing the existing business models and hence the existing stranglehold. It is rather amazing that FOSS has made any headway at all in such a climate. Given that it has, despite all this, the long term outcome is clear and no doubt which ever government is in power at the time will claim the credit for saving the tax payer millions ;-). Let's hope we can remind them of the reality in a few years time as supposedly developing nations leapfrog over our schools technology with better systems at a fraction of the cost. If FOSS does eventually take off in UK schools it will be despite rather than because of any government action.
Just for information, the wretched e-learning credit disappeared over a year ago, and COL has been disbanded. This happened shortly after the education software industry killed BBC digital curriculum. Shot itself in the foot, as the e-learning credit was a sop to allow BBC to go ahead! We are still clearing up the mess of masses of awful software installed on servers and in small departments in schools.
Thanks for your responses. From an LA project perspective, there is a problem in procuring open source. Procurement is expensive and statutory so we tend to use framework contracts wherever possible. These insist on service providers being demonstrably financially sound (which excludes most small consultancies).
Becta has framework contracts for most things, and their new super-procurement framework is likely to be the mother of all, with supply chains being managed by a handful of prime contractors. This trend is happening across LA's. The ESPO 113 contract we are part of covers every aspect of ICT ... except Open Source!
Part of the problem is that the big players already manage the supply chain, and it is nepitistic. They make money by being commercial, and that rarely includes open source as there isn't anyone to do business with and no profits to be made. As an example we use a Civica software agreement that provides software at discount prices. It's a one-click shop. Yet we can't get an OS expert in the same way.
We need to wake up to the fact that we either spend £300K on licenses or we spend half as much on the expertise needed to develop systems using OS and have unlimited scalability ... stark isn't it? BUT the OS expertise is not available in the way that commercial software is, so we can't get it.
We need to start a campaign to get OS as a seperate consulatncy framework! QED
Firstly, The OSC was set up to deal with just this situation. Collectively there was a plan for a bonding system to provide the security of a larger organisation but there was to this point no revenue to pay for the development of that. If an LA had a genuine commitment to FOSS it would not be difficult to work with the OSC to meet regulations on some smaller works and gradually build that up. That is probably a more likely scenario than diverting the BECTA juggernaut off frameworks. 130 MPs censured BECTA in an Early Day Motion for its outdated frameworks that excluded Moodle from the VLE system but even that made little difference to policy.
In many cases consultancy is not even subject to value for money checks. I am a consultant and I have never ever bid for work through a LA tender. That is because for a single consultant work is below the threshold and there are lots of smaller jobs that could be managed that way. eg I managed a tender which saved 70k on a 200k job simply because I made it generic, ie I said Office software not MS Office and an operating system that could do X,Y,Z not Windows. In fact I believe mostly tenders should not include brands unless there is explicit proof that nothing else can work. If LAs used people to prepare tenders that had a clue about FOSS then it would make it much more likely that FOSS solutions would get into the picture. Unfortunately, many of the "consultants" are not really tech neutral.
There is one FOSS company (Sirius) that got approved for BECTA frameworks after a lot of controversy. But again we get the situation where FOSS gets one small company included to compete with a massive closed source machine. There clearly can be business models that support FOSS, my own is designed to do so, but it is very difficult competing with large established brands even with better products. There has to be a will and vision to support small businesses not just political hot air. Having government stack the cards against small businesses and in the favour of what are largely non-UK multi-nationals is economic madness in the current climate. One of the reasons I'm looking abroad is that in poorer countries they can't afford to squander billions on infrastructure so alternative solutions are of interest. Again for a small business it is very difficult because of the time and investment needed - thank goodness for the EU!
So, hypothetically speaking, ... what ahould an LA be doing? Free hosting? setting up a consultancy framework? ... suggestions welcome!
I work at a Trust School and have implemented a fair number of open source systems in our school. In liaising with other schools it seems to be that Trust/Foundation/Faith/Independent schools are more likely to implement open source systems as they are used to planning and implementing their own end to end ICT strategy. I do know of some schools that have strong teachers/technical staff that have also seen the benefits of using open source software. So it is not purely down to the status of the school.
So my suggestion to schools that work under LA support is to take greater responsibility for how you can use ICT to meet your curriculum and administration needs. As what has been fairly clear to me is that LAs have done very little to support open source software within schools. There are some exceptions where I have seen Moodle /Squid/Dansguardian being used but these have been run under fairly restrictive support contracts that leave the school little scope to customise the solution to their own needs.
Tim
So maybe the answer is to vote Tory and see if they abolish LAs and make all schools independent ;-)
It's interesting that a community approach to technology and education development is entirely lost on a Labour government. LibDems probably have the most natural leanings in this direction but how likely are they to get elected? Who ever gets in saving money is likely to get a higher profile.
3 simple practical actions for LAs
If you want a fourth, put collective pressure on BECTA to sponsor FOSS development projects to stimulate the use of web based learning objects (NOT VLE and E-PORTFOLIO infrastructure - there is an over abundance of this and plenty of free software to support it) and counteract some of the damage caused by the inappropriate and illegal state aid given to the proprietary software industry through e-learning credits.
btw, any enterprising LA could apply for EU grants to support this type of work. I have done so as an individual with very sparse resources so LA's should have no problem. It is not a matter of there being no resources. It is entirely about the will to do something. I'll even give you a model application and free support.
This is all really odd from an economics perspective. The move from local purchasing to centralised purchasing should in theory allow bulk purchases at a lower cost and give the customer more control over the suppliers in the market. Actually it locks out the largest part of the marketplace from bidding (small suppliers) and leaves the customer at the mercy of the large suppliers.
A separate issue is the procurement process being run by people who think like Sir Humphrey Appleby who are looking for quantifiable savings to demonstrate the effectiveness of their procurement performance with questions along the following lines:
A. What is the retail price of this software?
B. What price are you going to charge in this bid?
Subtract B from A and multiply by the quantity to reveal how good your procurement negotiation is. This means that when the retail price is zero the procurement process can't deliver a saving.
Insisting on suppliers being demonstrably financial sound is at first glance a good idea, however it is a distortion. It locks out many small suppliers and ignores the fact that winning the contract would in itself positively effect the suppliers fiscal soundness. Additionally it overstates the consequences of supplier failure. If a school or local authority were to purchase support services from a number of small businesses they could easily change suppliers should they be dissatisfied with performance or in the event of a supplier failing financially. When a large company fails the consequences are significantly more severe than when a small and easily substitutable company fails.
This isn't to say that large companies can't provide good service and good value. They can. But when they don't have to compete with the community of small businesses the customer (in this instance us the taxpayers) does not get the value they deserve.
And you stifle innovation. We get all this rhetoric about innovation and leadership from the DCFS and BECTA yet when it comes to the crunch their systems almost guarantee that it can't happen. This is why classrooms and schools of the future always seem to end up looking very much like classrooms of the past with a few added cosmetic bells and whistles. I have had comments from QCA/Ofqual about how innovative we are. The fact is the core principles we use were in action in the 1980s but the National Curriculum/revised GCSE regs killed them! That is why we have to use vocational qualifications - because there is more flexibility to do things differently.
There are lots of elements to respond to, but a quick comment on the issue of using small companies rather than a single large one.
All contracts an LA has with external companies (rather than running things in-house) require service management and review for everything from performance against SLAs, customer satisfaction, financial management and so on... And the more companies you have to work with the more time consuming (and usually more costly in man hours if LA staff) and more risky it is. One of the benefits of a single large company is that the financial risk and stability of a single company can be evaluated and measured at the procurement stage, therefore removing a large chunk of the problem of the company going under.
Yes, there is always the problem that if this single large company goes under then *everyone* is screwed, or you end up throwing more money at the project to keep it stable but that is a very, very small risk. Some companies might outsource to smaller companies to do the work and mitigate that risk as if one of their smaller sub-contractors go under then they can pick up another one to replace them ... Oh, this is quite like the origianl suggestion really. So it boils down to getting a 3rd party to do the managing of those smaller companies and contracts rather than the LA to do it. Sometimes this works out cheaper, sometimes it doesn't. Discuss.
-- In general, my opinions, based on my experience and not a reflection on my employer or any other groups I am associated with *unless explicitly mentioned*.
Your recognising a real issue. If Open Source is to support critical infrastructure in education we must manage risk of failure to deliver, and we must figure out how to provide an operational performance regime. Small independent firms or consultants do not have the capacity to cover this risk on a major project, and therefore need either an equity / supply chain partner.
Open Source in schools often reduces to Moodle and free applications but the real commercial value in OS is in server side network infrastructure, yet this is underdeveloped. OS needs to be at the datacentre and delivering services down the pipe to collections of schools, not promoting a model where individual schools operate isolated systems run be one or two critical technicians who if they leave are hard to replace. We need a datacentre based ecosystem that delivers applications via virtual desktops, supports thin client end points and minimises the need for local technicians. I guess the answer is for OS to form a consortium, set up a datacentre and start offering single sign-on services that schools want to buy and supported by meaningful service level agreements based on availability and performance!
I would welcome Open Source consultants alongside us as we procure BSF and infrastructure projects. A simple brief might be to scrutininse bidder proposals and advise where Open Source could save money and how much ... how it would be supported etc. Better still, I'd like to see them advising our bidders so we can actually see bid responses that show these OS savings!
I sense Open Source faces challenges in establishing itself in education! I want to be able to visit schools that use Open Source applications, from the desktop through the network operating system and on to the datacentre ... a complete ecosystem for education. Such systems then need to be supported by commercial organisations who take the risk of operating it effectively and against performance penalties.
Incidentally, there are many firms using Open Source (PHP etc.) to create hosted web products to sell into education, but these are often no less expensive than similar products using proprietary software.
One commentator mentions that Foundation schools, Trust schools, independents etc. are more likely targets to use Open Source. I agree, because they act as individual institutions. The real value in Open Source though is the ability to share datacentre infrastructure and leverage the low marginal cost of scaling OS across institutions. This requires collaboration!
the datacentre approach and cloud computing with off site technicians and software provided as a black box service is interesting and up to date, but ignores the key value of Open Source software, in that you can look inside the box! The opportunity to lower costs is the first thing people see, but it really is the least interesting of all the benefits. Don't think of it as buying a product, think of it as buying into a way of thinking and joining a community.
By your response I could extrapolate that any solution that does not meet the OS way of thinking, in spite of it delivering against a number of given targets, is a 'bad thing'?
Almost as dangerous a mindset as those that say OSS is a waste of space because it is a bunch of men in sheds ... it treads in to the territory of saying "My way is the right way and everyone else is wrong!" ... a point I have raised in other arenas about why I don't like *any* evangelism about OS.
I am not saying that this is actually what you think, but it could be construed as that stereo-type.
-- In general, my opinions, based on my experience and not a reflection on my employer or any other groups I am associated with *unless explicitly mentioned*.
no, that isn't what I think. I think schools, local authorities and regional and national bodies should do whatever they feel right in any specific scenario. I don't think anything is bad per se, including proprietary software - just because something is proprietary it doesn't have to lock you in. I do think some things that have occurred have had unfortunate consequences from a competition in a free market standpoint. I am a little surprised that the freedom to study the software used does not appear to be highly valued in the education sector.
The cloud datacentre and outsourced managed service approach just feels a bit odd to me, it seems to be wrapping up open source software in such a way that you can't see the source. By all means if that makes sense to you then go for it. I will happily sit here feeling odd as long as my taxes go down and my kids get taught.
Quote: Actually it locks out the largest part of the marketplace from bidding (small suppliers) and leaves the customer at the mercy of the large suppliers.
So true.
The tender procurement process is not fit for purpose. Having tendered for a 5 figure requirement (not a specific product) and received the quite unnecessary brown nosed glossy tenders which I required within very few days (to reduce the agony of the poor souls charged with producing them) I pointed our Bursar at a significantly lower off the shelf box-fixer's price for the same product as one of the tenders. Given the OK, we asked several box shifters to quote for the same requirement, and ended up with a product recommended on one of the tenders (I can't remember whether it was the same tender) . We got the product, with 3 years support from the manufacturer, for less than any of the tender prices.
Centralised purchasing does not work. These centralised purchasing departments have to prove their value by covering their costs - and given the inefficiencies of the tendering process, rightly so. They are simply another unproductive link (=cost) in the supply chain. What does work is the grapevine that enables local primary schools to get the same prices we get - which incidentally can enhance our attractiveness to the low cost (no glossy tendering) suppliers who seek our business.
As for being financially sound - show me a purchase contract that really will accept liability for consequential losses and you might have a case, but especially for software, I suspect liability is usually limited to the price paid for the product. I have yet to meet a supplier who is not financially sound enough to meet that liability for any number of Ubuntu clients or Debian servers.
The key strategic element for me is our in-house skills. We teach this stuff and I take the view that it's a pretty poor show if we can't make it work ourselves. When we need support it is because a lesson is held up, and the loss we suffer if the support is not forthcoming is the loss of that lesson. There is no way any third party can supply the support we need to avoid that loss, except by providing adequately competent on-site technicians. And we don't need any unproductive links in that supply chain either, so we teach or train our own technicians as necessary.
Yes - it is an additional burden, but so much less of a burden than the alternative frustrating and expensive bureaucracy that just does not work.
Developing in house skills is a very important benefit of open source software. In fact, to put it another way, I think that denying teachers the opportunity to contribute to the software they use it is a terrible missed opportunity to tap into a vast resource of highly intelligent and capable people. This principal holds true for all industries, if people can participate in improving their working environment then they embrace change rather than resisting it.
In the end there is no real evidence that out-sourcing to large companies is less risky or provides better value in the IT field. Its really a political mantra. There are plenty of examples of expensive disasters.
Two things LAs could do are.
1. Make contact with the Open Source Consortium ( a not for profit trade association) and develop a strategy. Gerry Gavigan the Chairman, has extensive experience working at a senior level in government so he knows the issues well. OSC is ideally placed to manage small FOSS based companies and communicate with the large ones.
2. Specify FOSS in tenders. Unlike specifying Windows in a tender, all companies are free to supply a range of FOSS solutions because FOSS isn't a product, it's a method. It is perfectly legitimate to make it a condition that certain products are Free as in Libre. Sun open-sourced Solaris and OpenOffice.org, so MS could Open Source Windows and/or MS Office, they choose not to - it's a legitimate commercial decision - but if that excluded their product in a tender, tough. What matters is value for money for the customer and reduction of long term risk of lock-in, ironic given all the fuss about frameworks to ensure value when these are effectively reducing competition and increasing costs. If a preference for FOSS was expressed in tenders (and really it is a no-brainer for the public sector) the large closed source suppliers would start to take FOSS solutions seriously and would probably sub-contract to small FOSS businesses. Sun, Novell, Canonical etc all have core business strategies for FOSS. Its not like there are no multinationals that support FOSS, but tenders have to make it clear that that is what is required. At worst that would also force down the license fees for dominant closed source products. Getting advice from a consultant on putting together such a tender would cost maybe £1000 so there is no need to think about fragmenting SLAs etc. It's really, really simple.
I think the most reprehensible aspect of all this is bleating on about value for money and rigorously applying bureaucratic procedures in that name then having no strategy to move to a situation that would clearly improve value for money. What is BECTA's strategy to increase take up of FOSS in schools? The SOSP? What is your LA's strategy? To wait for BECTA to do it for you? How hard is it to devise a strategy based on the core business of learning? It makes anyone on the outside think that the motivation is not actually better value for money in supporting learning but to cover backs and avoid having to think too much. "Yes Minister" :-)
LA's have to procure through EU procedures, OJEU etc. Frameworks save us the cost of procurement which can be high by the time we've gone through a laborious EU tender process! What should we do when no Open Source solution or product is put forward by bidders ... ? Becta therefore needs to put OS into the supply chain.
We are hamstrung as we can only state our requirements in functional terms. Open Source firms need to put their no-brainer value for money propositions into the supply side! We aren't all Humphreys, but if it aint being offered we can't accept it!
I'm not an expert on procurement law, but my understanding was that OJEU rules only came into effect for procurements coming in at over €133K; if one's providing an open source solution in house, this pays for lots of Moodle/Ubuntu/OO.o licences ;-)
What's more, school procurements will, by and large, fall well below the magic figure, and thus schools do not have to use the framework agreements, something Becta acknowledge in their helpful Typical Customer Journey map in the ICT Supplier Briefing FAQ, where those under the threshold procure via their usual procedures, although if a customer wants to go with a managed service, they're invited to consider the ICT Services Framework.
One of the things about open source is that it makes it easy for folks to take charge of their IT themselves, at all levels, participating in the software development process if they choose to; yes, there's a place for consultants, suppliers and managed services, but FLOSS makes another way a viable reality for individuals, schools and authorities; you don't have to just swap one set of consutants/suppliers/MSPs for another.
That said, the Government's Open Source Action Plan, mentioned by both me and Stephen in Thursday's keynotes, makes it clear that:
Government Departments will challenge their suppliers to demonstrate that they have capability in open source and that open source products have been actively considered in whole or as part of the business solution which they are proposing. Where no overall open source solution is available suppliers will be expected to have considered the use of open source products within the overall solution to optimise the cost of ownership. Particular scrutiny will be directed where mature open source products exist and have already been used elsewhere in government. Suppliers putting forward non-open source products will be asked to provide evidence that they have carefully considered open source alternatives and to explain why they have been rejected.
Perhaps better than one would expect from Sir Humphrey? The above applies to the schools sector just as any other part of the public sector, and I'd expect that Becta's procurement team will be keen to ensure that the practice matches the policy here, as Dr Lucey's remarks to Merlin John last March indicated.
Interesting to read some of the comments here but we are fighting against an enormously entrenched proprietory attitude and wide misunderstanding of all things IT related in schools themselves. Let me give an example; in 2002 I installed the first Linux network at Skegness Grammar school. Since then I grew the network from a single lab into a full Linux LTSP schoolwide installation with approaching 200 client terminals and all curriculum ICT teaching was done with open source tools from KS3 to KS5. We even had dedicated HP thin clients at a cost of £15000 which were bought from our second specialism budget for Maths and computing - having started with old £15 Dell desktops as clients. The computing part of the second specialism was based on our open source work. About two years ago we had a change of headteacher who once told me he did not like the Ubuntu splash screen, I took it to be a dislike of the graphics but in fact it turned out to be a dislike of Linux. Although this headteacher admitted to knowing nothing about computing he formed an opinion based on personal whim. By the time he had asked some charlatans called Innovit to come in to recommend what should be done with the most complete and successful Linux installation in a UK school at the time, I had already decided to leave to work on my other project, ScholarPack. This bunch of project managers with fingers in proprietary pies produced a report that I was not permitted to view and indeed my involvement as head of ICT was only cursory when they came in to look at what we had. Apparently some of their recommendations were exactly what we had been asking for in terms of infrastructure for 18 months! Anyway I left and am now working on ScholarPack and Innovit recommended the sysadmin who got the job when the Linux sysadmin left - he was basically pushed out. In the meantime all those HP thin clients have been replaced with fat clients and I believe Windows server 2003 is being used. The headteacher did not understand that his school was a leader in open source software and now they are followers committed to the road of costly updates. Having had the latest, most up to date operating system they are now 7 years out of date and using the same version of Open Office they were on Linux! That adds up to a lot of money to go backwards in the OS and treadwater on the office software used.
I am deeply suspicious of BECTA's open source involvement too - three of them spent time with us in January 2008 to see how we did open source. I did not recieve any feedback on their visit. There was no report done, no case study - nothing. Try searching the BECTA website for Skegness.
I believe that the only way forward for open source uptake in schools would be a real commitment by government to force schools to consider alternatives and to educate those who have to make the decisions, so that they can base their decisions on sound facts and not just whims. Reducing severely the money available for ICT spend in schools may also help focus the thoughts of decision makers more clearly.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
We are in the fight stage so maybe not too long to go :-)
"educate those who have to make the decisions, so that they can base their decisions on sound facts and not just whims"
It is rather ironic that ignorance should be worn as a badge of honour by many senior employees in the education technology industry. IT is the only sphere in education where being an enthusiastic expert is seen as a disadvantage. Imagine in English saying "oh he's a Shakespeare Geek let's talk to the popular Sun reader and make our decision on their views instead". But there is a more enlightened generation coming through so give it a bit of time. In the end water flows downhill. :-)
I sense from your comments that the ICT at Skegness may have been a personal journey? Network Managers must be able to make their business cases but do not run their schools. Becta are 'observing' Open Source projects but my guess is that like me want to see schools with OS obtaining the ICT Mark before promoting or recognising them openly! Schools need to play the Becta game.
No it wasn't a personal journey. It was fully costed, discussed and planned at the SMT level, and was the percieved best solution to the ailing ICT provision we had. The aforementioned headteacher was involved in the planning as a deputy and fully supported the project at the outset (2002). But with more power comes more room for mistakes. I was ICT coordinator, not network manager. BECTA do not require schools with proprietory solutions to achieve the ICT mark before they case study them do they? This was not just an open source project, the whole ICT provision from router to desktop was OS.
Hm, how about schools playing the "let's educate children properly" game so they don't have the massive aversion to technological change demonstrated by the LA and Whitehall Mandarins - Oh, and give tax payers some better value ;-)
BECTA's own survey back in 2005 showed possible significant savings from migration to FOSS. That is over 4 years ago and what has been done about it? This country has spent over 4 billion on IT in schools since 2002 and is currently close to bankruptcy . The last 7 or 8 years have been personal journeys for many pioneers so I should think getting told to go and get the ICT Mark is like telling Einstein to go and get a GCSE in Physics. BECTA is simply sitting on the fence waiting for someone to de-risk everything for them. If we are saying that education is so centrally controlled by BECTA that schools have to jump through these inane bureaucratic hoops to keep them happy I say let's abolish the quangos ;-)
The ICT Mark evaluates technology against educational outcomes and as such has value. Having one Einstein in your tech support department doesn't mean the patent office runs effectively! It's not about de-risking for the benefit of Becta, its about de-risking operations in a school. This means a stable reliable and available infrastucture for teachers and learners as a basic requirement. Infrastructure includes CPD and systems for managing change. The ICT Mark is the first time a benchmark has been set for the way technology delivers teaching, learning and administration in a school. It is not based on any technology approach and has nothing to do with procurement. If Open Source cannot deliver within the Self Review Framework / ICT Mark, then it has no place in schools! I have no doubt it can, but it needs some schools to prove it so that the current intertia being generated around Open Source can be sustained.
On the issue of the concept of 'supported community' over 'managed service', without doubt there is a need for teachers and learners to play with technology, make changes to software etc., but it has to be built on 'carrier class' infrastructure and stability through effective device builds. The bulk of applications have to be installed as standardised packages across networks, etc. The desire for an innovative margin cannot be allowed to compromise the integrity of core services.
Add to this the need to reduce carbon across schools estates, the lack of available technical skills in our primary schools and the consequential trend towards the datacentre and remotely managed virtual desktops away from the local install is likely to become inevitable.
So, even though a school can deliver their entire curricular needs through open source software with the ICT department mentioned in the top 5 subjects at the school according to the Good School's guide, if it doesn't have the ICT mark then OS has no place in this school? How much proof do you need? But then is it OK to have proprietory solutions without the ICT mark as in thousands of schools and why do you insist on proof for OS but accept that the evolution of proprietory solutions in our schools was the correct evolutionary pathway? No one puts barriers in the way of MS adoption - why?
What on earth is this: "'carrier class' infrastructure and stability through effective device builds"
Someone should let Google into the secret, they may be doing it wrong ;-)
"Add to this the need to reduce carbon across schools estates, the lack of available technical skills in our primary schools and the consequential trend towards the datacentre and remotely managed virtual desktops away from the local install is likely to become inevitable."
And all perfectly solved with an LTSP installation, and if you don't believe me come and see a local primary that is doing just that.
The argument about OS being an innovation and therefore by definition has no central place in school ICT has been going on since I started in the OS world about 10 years ago. I see the same old things brought out time and time again, and frankly I am getting bored with the arguments, and bored defending them. It's about time the educational establishment in the UK opened their minds to alternatives as many in the US have done. It is no coincidence that the proportion of technology startups in the US is significantly higher than in the UK. Education is the key and freedom within that education for all avenues of thought, is paramount.
On the issue of the concept of 'supported community' over 'managed service',
We are a comprehensive state secondary and have an entirely Open Source implementation at the infrastructure level (except SIMS and the Windows Antivirus server running on Win2k3, running on KVM Virtual Machines on Debian). We also have over 60 fully Open Source (ubuntu) workstations and Open Office on the various proprietary Operating Systems we have.
The service we have is a "managed service" with a support contract, and "supported community" is core to the development and useful for fixing things, but we have the certainty of a single throat to choke should something go wrong. The main bulk of implementation was done this summer after a couple of years of planning with full Senior management approval. We chose a Becta accredited company to do this. Training was included from the planning stage.
Can FOSS and "managed service" be used in the same sentance? It looks like it to me.
Also should I have to hang my head in shame that I've never heard of "ICT Mark" until you mentioned it? I wonder if anyone at our LEA has heard of it? That I lurk in places like here shows I am at least making an attempt to be concientious about supporting ICT in my school.
Not saying ICT Mark hasn't value. LAs and BECTA waiting for schools to get a "kite mark" that is achievable for general good practice when we are talking about unusual and difficult change is just not seeing the bigger picture.
Most innovation is initiated by individuals, not systems. In fact systems generally mitigate against innovation (Hence the Einstein quote - patents were not why Einstein won a Nobel prize, he got it for work on the photoelectric effect, not relativity because the establishment couldn't understand relativity never mind why it might be important) If you want innovation and change in education you have to put up with some interim disruption, it goes with the territory. Your post illustrates exactly why the UK has such a problem with change management.
Those in positions of centralised power want other people to make it safe to go in the water using bureaucratic symbols and criticise the same people if anything goes wrong. They come up with bureaucratic frameworks in the name of quality assurance and it becomes their reason for living. There is no incentive to provide leadership. The last BECTA development plan I saw had not a single quantifiable target that they could be held accountable to - contrast that with what schools are expected to do.
Innovation comes from brave individuals not bureaucratic systems. Read any management text on organisational cultures eg Charles Handy is easy reading. Role cultures and large bureaucracies are bad at change. Task focussed cultures in small business units are good at it. Waiting for bureaucratic symbols like ICT Mark before doing anything is fiddling while Rome burns.
If Open Source cannot deliver within the Self Review Framework / ICT Mark, then it has no place in schools!
Perhaps if this is the case, the Self Review/ICT Mark is at fault. Why do you think that the imposed bureaucratic system is always right? After all globally, the FOSS changes are far bigger than any parochial system in one country. Having said that, I doubt very much that there is any problem achieving ICT Mark with FOSS - it's a red herring.
Very few if any schools are completely FOSS so the statistical chances are low of finding schools that are entirely FOSS that have ICT Mark and even if you found some disasters what would it prove? In change management there are going to be disasters because it is new and learning has to take place. In fact we need to use these positively to find out how to do it better not as a reason to abandon change. Waiting for schools with ICT Mark to go entirely FOSS when the whole world is talking about the shift as the biggest global change taking place in the software industry is just missing the point. I come back to BECTA's own survey 4 years ago - FOSS will save money. So what leadership is being provided by the authorities to make my taxes go further?
I agree with the statement by Simon King about the ICT Mark - I haven't heard of it but I suspect it doesn't apply to British Curriculum schools overseas. We are running 99 Ubuntu machines in our Primary School and are also entirely Ubuntu in the high school, college and other two schools in Nairobi and are changing the rest of the group (11 schools) to Ubuntu over the next two years.
As to schools that are entirely using FOSS as questioned by Ian (above) I would like to mention we are using FOSS entirely through the teaching side of the school although we still have some management software we are trying to change to run on Ubuntu. The school are looking at Garry Saddingtons 'Scholarpack', we use Mahara, Moodle, Joomla and various software from the Ubuntu repositories but no proprietary software other than for school finances and that is only on the admin side of the group. The children love it and we are saving a fortune - the ability to offer more interesting programmes and upto date software makes it a winner with parents and children alike - although you do need establish a good local repository to manage downloads.
The ICT Mark sounds interesting and on the face of it quite achievable. Whats in it for the school? Cost is about £500 plus some time and effort to fill out the form and entertain an inspector for the day. What does the school get out of it? Can the fee be paid by someone else? Would that incentivise a school to actually go through the process?
Lots of talk here about why Open Source is not being implemented at any great scale across UK schools and LAs and the answer is very simple. We are not organised to do things at scale and we have no body that is responsible to do that. In many other countries the uptake of OS is encouraged at Government Level and then supported. Here it is finally being encouraged but still not supported.
To implement at large scale you need to baseline savings, demonstrate benefits, devise implementation plans, and implement with the right level of support and skills necessary to ensure that replacement of any legacy solution is risk free. The risk of implementing open source should not sit with individual schools it should sit at national, regional and LA level and the reduction of risk should be taking place there first.
For a number of OS projects this can be done by a group of LAs working together to do the core busines case work and then support each other in developing and sharing skills, possibly setting up regional solutions centres that can help either at LA or at school level. Then and only then will OS become established solutions at a national level generating development communities that will be capable of getting rid of SIMS, MS Office and many other failed and fractured solutions around Learning Platforms, filtering and e-portfolios that sit in our schools and cost far too much in annual licences.
We have a group of around 25 LAs at the moment who are prepared to work together, with OSS, BECTA and anyone else who wishes to - to achive these aims. if you wish to tackle OS implementation as part of a very focused set of develpments then just drop me an email and I'll send more information as the group gets organised.
gary [dot] clawson [at] nwlg [dot] org
North West Learning Grid
Great stuff Gary, this is just the sort of leadership that is needed. I'll pass on the message to the OSC as I'm sure there will be interest there.