A sticky situation at BBC jam
From conception to inception BBC jam has been controversial and the slings and arrows are still coming.
The latest problem they face comes courtesy of the Content Advisory Board (CAB), a body created by the government to advise BBC jam. In its most recent report to Ruth Kelly (written late last year) the CAB, ‘noted our particular concern that the digital curriculum service does not appear to complement the services provided by the commercial sector, and a degree of disappointment with the extent to which the prototypes demonstrated genuine technological or pedagogical experimentation’.
This is a damming indictment from the government’s own advisors and in theory it should influence the DCMS in its review of the BBC’s Royal charter and financial settlement. However, the condemnation would have been far worse had not the CAB’s members been drawn almost exclusively from the civil service!
To add insult to injury, the CAB has also called for the original condition that restricted the activities of BBC jam to be reviewed by the DCMS, because they feel that these restrictions are part of what is stopping the BBC from ‘developing complementary and distinctive output’. Strangely, the 18 conditions imposed by the DCMS when it gave the BBC the go-ahead for the Digital Curriculum in 2003 are virtually identical to what the BBC had proposed to the DCMS when it submitted its revised proposal for the Digital Curriculum in 2002.
Just when you thought that this imbroglio couldn’t get worse, it does, in the third of the CAB’s recommendations. To ensure the BBC do not duplicate the work of private sector suppliers, the CAB would like to establish a committee where major players from the private sector share their product development plans with the BBC, in a ‘confidential setting’.
This is madness; the simple fact is that BBC jam is failing to deliver the output it promised. Fixing this will take more than the half-baked ideas emanating from the quango of civil servants sitting on the CAB.
A good first step would be to make the CAB a bipartisan representative body with members from both the supply and demand sides of the education community. Is this likely to happen? No, the government seems a bit too preoccupied with the growing scandal around Academy schools and non-deported prisoners to worry much about a bit of split milk at BBC jam.