When what you get might not be what you see
June 2008
Merlin John
There was once a time when information and communications technology was deliberately made visible in schools, when teachers and heads would even joke about making it extra high profile to impress parents and governors when they visited. But as ICT gets embedded in schools, and managed services make inroads through major contracts, what is physically visible can become misleading.
‘What You See Is What You Get’, or WYSIWYG as it became known, was one of the first ICT acronyms to hit the mainstream. But it is not particularly indicative of the technology itself. The emerging value lies in the relationships that surround it.
Northern Ireland’s Classroom 2000 (C2K) network for all of its schools is reckoned on being the biggest PC network in Europe, and certainly the biggest education one of its kind. So on a visit to Northgate Education, which manages C2K, you would expect to see an impressive set-up – and it is. As you walk into its Newtownabbey, North Belfast, centre you go straight into a vast open-plan office where around four to five hundred people are mostly at the PCs at their desks, a convincing image of a purposeful, equitable workforce.
So this is the nerve centre of C2K? Hmmm, yes, but not quite. A relatively small group of these staff, around 20, actually run the 3,000 or so servers in all 900 primary, 230 post-primary and 45 SEN schools across Northern Ireland (that’s 20,000 teachers and 330,000 pupils). The rest of the staff in this centre work on many other projects because Northgate has grown a significant range and variety of managed services - including handling £40 billion in salaries - which it runs from 25 offices across the UK. The statistics could go on but it’s probably best to park them at 6,000 staff in 46 countries across five continents – and you get the picture.
Remember the massive explosion at the Buncefield petroleum depot in Hertfordshire in December 2005? It totally destroyed the data centre run by Northgate Information Solutions, part of this group, which was responsible for managed services running wage systems for thousands of workers, including a managed network for hospitals in East Anglia. But staff simply transferred to back-up facilities elsewhere and the systems were soon up and running again. Despite the initial disruption, no one went without their wages!
While schools are yet to be convinced of all their data being held remotely, partly because broadband access in many areas is simply not as broad as the marketing would suggest, the practices developed by businesses mean that managed services are getting ever more robust and sophisticated.
Northgate staff are happy to demonstrate how a relatively small team of fewer than 20 people can respond to schools’ requests for help from the C2K first point of contact, the call centre run by HP. Staff have remote access to every single school through RM’s Community Connect network, and Compuware tools for proactive systems management and alerting. Most maintenance and repairs can be done remotely. If not, technicians are promptly sent to the schools.
Most impressive is the diagnostic software developed to analyse the performance of hardware in schools. This allows staff to replace faulty hard discs, for example, before a school is even aware there is a problem. So far, so straightforward.
Just a 15-minute drive from the Northgate centre, in a picturesque, rural market town, is a secondary school with an enviable reputation for its use of ICT. Ballyclare High, with 1,200 pupils and 80 staff, which was awarded Becta’s ICT Excellence Award for Best Whole School (secondary) in 2006, is another place where things are not as they might at first seem.
Pre-visit information that teachers at Ballyclare wear gowns – and they do - could conjure an image of a rather formal regime. But nothing could be further from the actual experience of the friendly, relaxed but engaging atmosphere. The school buildings show evidence of the progression of architectural styles used for every consecutive extension to the original 1950s building. The careful use of space, and the centrality of the curriculum, is evident, and at Ballyclare’s heart is the modern learning centre which bears evidence of the kinds of flexible learning spaces and practices at the heart of the current Building Schools for the Future programme in England. The Ballyclare vision of learning allows for a full range of experiences.
Based around the library, students in the learning centre can work independently in some spaces more reminiscent of higher education, and there are spaces for tutored group presentations and group collaborative work too. Like the rest of the school it is all supported by pervasive but unintrusive ICT that can be used collectively, independently, or independently in a classroom space - or in a network room for the kinds of activities that might require it.
What becomes clear during the tour is that the ICT is now embedded in curriculum work – still an aim for many schools. A conversation with headmaster David Knox and bursar Trevor Martin (also an expert in ICT) makes it clear that Ballyclare is anything but complacent. Trevor Martin explains that managed services have their pros and cons. While it’s possible to get an engineer on site within four hours, “the downside is that you have less control”. The bottom line though, is “we are here to teach”. (Ballyclare’s motto is “Encouraging lifelong learning in a caring, creative community”.)
However, the school’s single-mindedness provides a working demonstration of the flexibility that a school’s independence can bring to managed services. Ballyclare is pursuing its own learning platform – Studywiz – rather than the favoured Northern Ireland solution, Learn NI. (Northgate has developed its own learning platform for BSF, N-able, a bespoke version of the Fronter VLE integrated with MIS systems, which is used in the first BSF schools in the UK, in Bristol, where Northgate is the ICT provider.)
The difference of opinion is hardly a major political issue, just a practical decision that will prove its worth, or otherwise, in the fullness of time. Ballyclare will be able to explore the collaborative possibilities of Studywiz but will not immediately enjoy a VLE that’s integrated with its management ICT (the option on offer to C2K schools).
It’s the kind of accommodation which comes to the fore when things change. Like the role of ICT coordinators and technicians, as Northgate’s marketing manager Eleanor Lee explains. Managed services can provide career opportunities and progression for school ICT staff who can choose that route – working for a company like a Northgate or RM does hold out advantages. Another positive outcome for staff is that they can be released to move on to more creative school activities, and to other priorities like supporting the curriculum. This is an important issue for schools involved in BSF.
There are other nuances too, as Northgate, now a major player in BSF, is happy to point out. For example a priority emerging in BSF is what’s loosely termed the ‘30-minute fix’, a commitment to, say, replace a faulty laptop very quickly. C2K, however, is based on ‘availability’ of ICT. If a server goes down it’s a high priority and a technician could be there in 15 minutes. But if a PC goes down is it a good use of resource to get someone out to a school when other PCs are available in the short term?
It’s on the return to the Northgate centre from Ballyclare that the significance of the ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ elements of ICT sinks in. That’s when it’s pointed out, and you would never have guessed it, that Ballyclare actually has more PCs than the cavernous open-plan Northgate office – roughly 550-600 to Northgate’s 400-450. And where Northgate staff log in first thing in the morning and only use an average of three or four software programs all day before they log off and go home, Ballyclare’s students log in as groups and individually right across the school day, and use a far wider range of programs - a far, far tougher prospect for the management team.
This is the point when the inescapable argument for managed services in education locks in. Looking back to Becta’s introduction of the concept of managed services and ‘total cost of ownership’ in the 1990s, it’s easy to recall the general acceptance of the arguments even then. However, it was another thing for a government agency, or a government even, to develop the marketing nous and creativity to ‘sell’ that concept and produce flexible models that could provide good value for both schools and suppliers. There are successful examples, like Dudley for example, but the opportunities were elusive.
With the BSF programme in full flight, with managed services at the fore, and the Primary Capital Partnership holding out promise for English primary schools, it’s clear that there are very important lessons – for learning, ICT and management - to be learned from C2K. The pace of technological developments is unremitting, so change has now become a constant to be managed – and that is why relationships are becoming crucial.