Originally posted to Naace's Advisory Talk List

For Local Authorities the world has changed for us all with the recent cuts to HT Grant and it is very clear that IT support services and products that we currently provide will not be provided next year. This is likely to have a serious detrimental impact on Local Authority staff employed in supporting ICT.......unless we quickly put in a cost effective way of providing ICT services to schools that incorporates these valuable people and yet is a lower cost than before. I firmly believe that this can be done through the implementation of open services.

 Essentially the construction of Open Services means that you start with the aim of removing every single 'software' licence and replace with licence free products. Your starting point is to assess what this may save by looking at the cost of every single licence paid from SIMS to Learning Platforms, from Digital Learning Resources to server and desktop. This also includes all expenditure from school budgets as your final Open Service proposal will inevitably fall to funding from school budgets. Second stage will be to break down the costs into small projects some with easy implementation, others carrying risk but all of them involving what will now be your main resource, your staff, as it is the retention of staff doing entirely different duties that will be one of the main products of this sustainable model.

On the face of it, it seems a difficult challenge but there are a large number of quick wins with National Digital Resource Bank, Moodle and even content filtering. SIMS will take a little longer but check out how much you spend on that at the moment!

In parallel to looking at these costs you will also need to understand what contractual obligations you have and when contracts for these licence based services cease so you can draw up a list of ones to replace and in what order.

You will need some help to justify the introduction of Open Services but there will never be a greater need, nor such a set of circumstances that will exist as the ones that do now. Without doing this we will lose many valuable support staff when we could simply have reconfigured what we provide and how we provide it.

Over the summer North West Learning Grid will be working with a number of its Local Authorities to look at financial baselines, products, template SLAs and staffing roles needed to introduce Open Services as a support model for all of your schools that you can provide - a model which will be the most economic way of maintaining ICT that your schools will be able to obtain. I implore you not to just look at ways of reducing costs just by buying less and having less staff, but by reconfiguring what you provide for a world without the Harnessing Technology Grant. Plan for the future because schools will still need ICT support, they will still need yourselves and your support staff.

If you want to be kept in touch with what we are doing over the summer and get the final outputs of this in September, as well as being part of a community that will work together and change the way we implement and support ICT from this point on - then simply contact me and I'll ensure you are kept informed. Equally I'm looking for information around current costs so we can work out where best to concentrate. Finally have a quick read of the article from Miles Berry below, whose knowledge is far greater than mine. Miles has written it from the viewpoint of a school capable of that level of self implementation, I'm simply just looking to put it into a financial and implementation framework so that Local Authorities can be the bringers of change and the supplier of support services and not be subject to the actions of a government clearly determined to break up existing successful models for their own ideological self indulgence.