Knowing what schools, students and teachers are doing online is important for suppliers, but reliable figures are hard to find. Fortunately, each year the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) conduct research, although most of the results and data are only available to BESA members.
Their most recent report, ‘Information and Communication Technology in UK State Schools’ has just been released. It makes for interesting reading. Probably the most important outcome for content suppliers is the finding that over 50% of all schools are now downloading ‘significant’ amounts of free material from the web. In fact the report even says that their findings may actually underestimate the amount of material being downloaded.
While this represent a major commercial challenge for content producers, it is an equally serious HR issue for the DCSF and Local Education Authorities. Both of these bodies should be looking at how much time teachers are wasting scouring the internet for ‘free’ resources, when they could be using their time more productively and using the online and other resources they already have more effectively. Online resources are only ‘free’ if teachers and schools don’t take into account the time they spend finding them alongside the extra costs of adapting and/or printing material. In terms of teachers’ time, this issue is analogous to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of computer hardware, something most schools also underestimate.
While free web resources will always be part of the mix, schools need to ensure that teachers make the maximum use of the resources they already have (and have paid for) and that they have appropriate time management training.
Another important issue which we think is particularly relevant is BESA’s findings about bandwidth. These show that the average bandwidth is just 2.6 Mbps in primary and 12.4 Mbps in secondary schools. These figures equate to an average of 45 primary and 250 secondary students being concurrently connected at 64Kbps. Bandwidth in the UK is simply too expensive and too slow. If we really want to take advantage of the internet in education we need a minimum speed of 100 Mbps at home and far more in schools. This is already a reality in South Korea. EU countries like Germany and France are already investing in the necessary infrastructure. If they can so must we - if we don’t it won’t just be our students who are left behind, it will be our economy and standard of living.
