There was a time when I was all for government money being poured into education technology. Managed wisely, schemes can do a lot of good. Unfortunately, there are too many instances of schemes being ill thought out, or where the system could be gamed.

For example:

• A target of getting more schools connected to the internet resulted, to some extent, in “connected” being interpreted as one computer in the school library being available on the days the school librarian worked. I’ve written about this in the article The Department For Education's Ed Tech Strategy: Better Late Than Never?

• An incentive to have an e-safety policy in exchange for extra funding provided a perverse incentive for schools to use a standard template and just slot their school’s name into the relevant space.

• A scheme to get more teachers up to speed with technology worked best in those schools using providers who bent the rules. The rules stated that the funds could be used only for helping teachers use technology in their lessons, not how to use the technology per se. Well, it should be obvious that if a teacher doesn’t know how to use, say, PowerPoint, they’re not going to be interested in how to apply their non-existent skills to their lessons. (See also My Worst IT Training Days #4: Too Much Admin On A Course.)

• Schemes to help schools find and share high quality resources lead to questions like: Who is judging the quality of these resources? What happens to those providers who aren’t on the approved list, if there is such a list?

• A scheme to encourage schools to buy interactive whiteboards precluded them, at first, from buying tablets instead. In fact, it seemed to me at the time that all such schemes penalised schools which had either (a) already invested heavily in education technology or (b) really looked into what kind of technology would work best for them or, most likely (c) both. The schemes favoured the lowest common denominator.

• Government kitemarking schemes, whether of apps or books, can skew the market (who’s going to publish an unapproved book or scheme even if it’s a better quality than the approved ones?), and in any case smacks of too much government interference.

• Government help for schools planning their education technology purchases may be useful, but could also serve to take work away from ed tech consultants (although it hasn’t affected me).

• Some schemes I know of have been either poorly managed, micromanaged or not managed (because the people responsible were moved on to other positions).

As much as I hate to say it, because I don’t agree with him on many things, the economist Milton Friedman was right about the wastage that can occur when Government decides to spend taxpayers’ money on things without proper management in place. He advocated no government spending on anything as far as I recall, a situation which I think is neither desirable nor tenable. However, I do think he was right about the economic dangers of government or local government spending, which may be summed up in this table:

If you try to place the kind of schemes I’ve mentioned onto the table above, they fit into the bottom row. The government is spending someone else’s money (that collected from taxpayers) on a third party. Consequently, it has no incentive to minimise costs, and no incentive to maximise value for money. I realise that this implies a pretty dim view of human nature, but unfortunately, in my experience, it seems to be accurate in the contexts of local and central government.

In my opinion, the government has a duty to ensure a minimal viable product, so to speak, but then step back. I’m not so naive as to believe that the free market is perfect, but I think government decrees are even less perfect.