BECTA decide to try to become engaging
BECTA, the government’s educational IT agency, has grown rapidly, but it has not always been a favourite of those who have to deal with it. A prickly approach and slightly impenetrable structure are not unusual in the Civil Service nor in their offspring - the growing number of Non Departmental Public Bodies (NDPB’s) such as BECTA.
Fortunately, BECTA seems to have finally woken up and is in the process of recruiting a Head of Stakeholder Engagement, whose remit will be to ensure the education community and ‘other intermediaries’ (presumably the private sector) are ‘engaged proactively at an early stage and have true ownership of the solutions BECTA is developing on their behalf’. Wonderful, except that BECTA doesn’t actually produce the technology solutions used or needed in schools, the private sector do. Perhaps if they understood this fundamental issue there would be less need to spend £43K (+benefits) on this role?