Few but a journalist would wade through the brightly coloured but terminally dull report produced by the governors of Teacher’s TV (TTV).

Most chapters are full of self-congratulatory spin about things like winning the prize for best Public Sector Service in the low profile Revolution Awards, and it is only in the minutiae that the facts come out. These are -
the channel cost £16m to run in its second year, audience reach per week is 37,000 out of a potential audience of 993,000 (435,000 teachers, 290,000 support staff and 258,000 governors) or 3.7%.

Yet TTV still claim to have 497,000 viewers per month via digital television and streamed via the internet - a massive 50% of their total potential audience, although a large proportion seem to watch for a very short time (5 minutes or less). When the audience figures from Ipsos MORI are put against the costs of TTV, they provide a cost of £2.60 per hour of professional development, compared to about £37.50 per hour for a traditional CPD course. This is then reinterpreted as TTV delivering the equivalent of £37.5m of CPD. Strangely in one paragraph CPD is set to cost £300 per day and in the next just £150 per day. This is not just a simple arithmetic slip and when we showed the figures to a senior media executive he described the figures as ‘quite simply preposterous’.

The report also highlights the desire of TTV to be classified as a public service broadcaster and to have the ability to broadcast 24 hours per day via Freeview. Getting 24x7 distribution would cost an additional £11m on top of the £16m it costs to run the whole channel.

So if the economics and audience figures are suspect, at least the local production industry should be benefiting from all the new programmes being commissioned? Well the answer is yes and no.

TTV did commission an exemplary 208 hours of programmes in 2005/6, but it also purchased 174 hours from broadcasters. None of this is critical from a financial perspective - after all, what’s £16m out of the DfES’s 2005/6 budget of £30.3bn?

If TTV really is as successful as its governors would have us believe then it will be interesting to see how much a commercial broadcaster might be willing to pay for it after the end of its three year trial.

Our guess is that it’s not an asset that the private sector would pay to own, but the existing partners (or perhaps just Brook Lapping) would be happy to keep running it so long as it is via a contract extension and not a full OJEC tender. Very happy indeed, especially as the governors this year approved a performance-related bonus for Education Digital of 57%, which equalled £912k, more than 5% of the total cost of running the channel!

While the governors also hope that sponsorship and advertising might help offset the costs of TTV, the best they could say was, ‘In Year 2 some of these began to be developed’. An international or franchised version with some of the 40 countries who have enquired about TTV might be the only way to ever get any money back from the DfES’s investment to date.

www.teachers.tv
www.tenalps.com/brook_lapping