Do we really want incompetent central administrations getting directly involved in schools’ ed tech?

My mixed feelings

One of the things I struggle with is how far governments should get involved in education technology. There is potential to gain much, but governments always seem to manage to screw it up somehow. Well, at least in England: I don’t feel qualified to speak about the experience of other countries.

When the going was good (?)

Back in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s and early 2000s, it was useful having government funding for school IT investment, but it was not without its problems. These arose from a combination of interpretation and implementation.

For example, one the targets was for all schools to be connected to the internet. In some schools this involved having one computer in the library connected to the internet, available for use on Wednesday afternoons when the part-time school librarian was at work. OK, I’m exaggerating slightly, but only slightly.

A project to get whiteboards into schools resulted in headteachers having to get permission to use the money for tablets instead — on the grounds that in practice there wasn’t much difference between a teacher standing at the front of the class at a chalkboard and standing at the front at a whiteboard.

Some of the initiatives I thought worked quite well, such as the “hands-on” project. I think the family computing project worked well. But at least one of these schemes was implemented without any criteria by which to measure its success or otherwise, while other schemes seemed to work better when the government’s guidelines were ignored.

Too much of a good thing?

At one point, in 2006 I think, I was invited to give a talk to trainee teachers about government education technology projects, so I thought I’d list them. I stopped when I reached 40. I asked someone in the department for education (or the department for education and skills as it was then) if anyone in the department knew what was going on in other departments, given that there seemed to be no co-ordination between all these projects.

“We don’t even know what the person in the next desk is working on” was his reply.

Reflections

If we look at the current administration’s involvement in ed tech it is, to my mind, less than impressive. However, it is at least getting involved, even if its tone and competence leave something to be desired. I say that because I think perhaps an important benefit of government involvement is that this signals to schools that this is important. I’d prefer it, though, if they could find a way of signalling that without, so to speak, rolling up their sleeves and getting directly involved. But how?

Influence not dictation

Departments for Education and Government in general could do the following:

• Lead by example in their use of technology, protection of personal data, and in launching IT projects that actually work and do not descend into a debacle.

• Include proficiency of use of ed tech in the teachers’ standards.

• Set an expectation that schools be technology-rich. A good test of this might be to ask: what would happen to the kids’ education if the school building burnt down tomorrow? Or if there was a pandemic….

• Provide funding that schools are able to access in order to achieve the preceding bullet point in whatever way they saw fit. I think each school’s own community (in alphabetical order: governors, headteacher, parents, staff, students) know better than central government what their detailed targets should be.

• Provide guidance and resources as that they have been since the launch of the education technology strategy in 2019 and, in particular, in the last few weeks. Although my own preference would be for the DfE to facilitate the collation of resources and guidance not only from commercial suppliers but individual teachers. I realise there would be issues to deal with, especially of quality and protection of copyright, but I believe that the Teacher Resource Exchange set up by Becta many moons ago worked very well, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work again.

Conclusions

I don’t think it’s just in education that government IT projects are doomed to fail. See, for example, Doomed: Challenges and solutions to government IT projects. I think in education it comes down to a mixture of smoke and mirrors (does anyone actually monitor whether policy is being implemented?), lack of expertise (would an Ofsted inspector be able to judge whether or not an ed tech policy was being implemented effectively?), spending money raised from a third party (taxpayers) on a different third party (schools) (using a model developed by the economist Milton Friedman), and just plain incompetence. (See my article Government Money For Ed Tech? Yes, With Caveats for an elaboration of some of these points, especially the reference to Friedman.)

UPDATE

About three minutes after posting this blog post I came across a tweet by Tony Parkin linking to this article:

Digital public services fail UK citizens on multiple fronts

Well worth a read, and shows that it’s not just in education that government is found wanting when it comes to technology projects.