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Gary Flood

How should researchers and educationalists passionate about the positive impact of ICT feel about Chancellor Gordon Brown?

It’s a relevant question, given the Chancellor’s very public commitment to investing in education as a way to secure the UK’s long term economic competitiveness. In successive speeches he has committed to some £100 billion extra money going into education in the next three years, and in January he told the BBC, “What's going to make our economy successful? Education. What's going to make Britain great in the modern world? Education. What's going to give people higher standards of living is going to be education.”

Such comments echo a continuing theme - in his 2004 Budget speech Brown promised: “By 2015 every [British] secondary school can be refurbished or rebuilt with world class technology in every school and the best state-of-the-art learning support in every classroom.” Meanwhile in practical terms a number of specific initiatives, such as Building Schools for the Future and Partnerships for Schools, are starting to make progress.

That’s not to say that we have crossed any finish lines yet. “There’s been tremendous improvement in the past three years,” says Mark Riches, an executive at Synergy TV, a company that supplies social networking technology such as online radio to schools. “Schools that were incredibly poor in technology terms are a lot, lot better. But you can still see some places that are space stations in terms of their kit and others that are still way behind and have lots of problems, very often having a problem supporting their ICT.”

“We are beginning to see really innovative uses of technology in the classroom,” adds Tony Speakman, Regional Manager for a database company called FileMaker, whose technology has traditionally been used for school administration purposes but is now finding its way into applications such as supporting e-learning and curriculum support.

Speakman and others do put this down mainly to the extra money coming into education and especially ICT for education. But along with such praise come the critics. Political opponents of Labour have been quick to allege that the ‘extra’ £100 billion mentioned by the Chancellor last year is money already allocated, for instance. So is the money getting in – and is it being used effectively?

“As a realist I have to say that of all Government money, some will be wasted, yes,” says Speakman. “But that’s as true of Government as it is of any household and every company.”

Another possible negative in the reception of ICT in the front-line classroom, away from brave statements in Westminster or Whitehall, is the openness of teachers to the possibilities of technology. Again, there is some encouraging news here. Electronic whiteboards, for instance, are really starting to make headway. A recent study (the Maestro Report) by Lancaster University into the impact of one maths package, RM Maths Alive, found that 63% of pupils from Year 7 to Year 9 said that their enjoyment of maths had increased since the beginning of Year 7, and some 87% said they enjoyed using interactive whiteboards in such lessons. And on the other side of the desk, a number of teachers surveyed said they believed that the use of this medium was having a positive impact at a subject attainment level; five of the schools surveyed attributed improved Key Stage 3 SATs results in maths to this technology.

Great – but it’s getting the teachers on-side that may be the ultimate success factor in school ICT. “You can’t pull the wool over the eyes of this audience,” says Speakman. “Doesn’t matter how much money the Government does or doesn’t put in, or suppliers invest in R&D as they see this is a growth market: it’s what teachers see in their hands that is going to actually help them in the classroom. These guys are pretty cynical about technology – they need to see something that 30 teenagers aren’t going to give them lots of grief about. I think we are starting to see such applications, however.”

Riches agrees that educators need to come on board, but thinks it needs to be happening at the leadership level. “I definitely think this is down to Heads,” he says. “In fact in the schools where I see really effective use of ICT it’s from there that the difference has come. There are issues still to be tackled around training and support, but if the Head is behind information technology I think these obstacles can quickly be overcome.”

So the verdict has to be that Brown hasn’t been wasting all that investment, real progress has been made – but it’s up to the educational community to take the next step to make ICT the powerful aid it can be in the day-to-day environment.

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