Features
Edtech Snapshot: England
9/6/2012 By: Terry Freedman
For a couple of decades, the
educational technology sector in England
has enjoyed the largesse of various
government officials who were convinced
that it would be beneficial for the economy in
the long term. However, not all of these “gifts”
were entirely useful, such as the scheme to send a
modem to every school before most people really
knew what they could do with it. And then there
were various iterations of a “laptop for teachers”
scheme. Sadly, this initiative did not provide every
teacher with a laptop nor exempt them from the
sales tax incurred when buying their own.
Nevertheless, all of these schemes provided a
statement of intent and a statement of philosophy.
From 1997 until recently, the drive towards
making Britain’s schools “e-enabled” (i.e., using
educational technology as an integral part of
everything they do) became more systematic
and more relentless. More money has
been allocated to schools for switching
to broadband access, increasing the
pupil-to-computer ratios in both
elementary and high schools, designing
a national strategy to beef up the
teaching of Information and Communications
Technology (ICT), creating a building
program for schools, and developing goals for
implementing virtual learning environments
(VLEs) and online reporting to parents.
Then, a couple of years ago, the new
Coalition government came to power. The
funding was cut (to zero, for the most part), new
builds were cancelled, and the ICT community
as a whole took to wringing its hands in despair.
But by that time, ICT had been fairly wellestablished
and as you can see from the evidence,
most English schools had the following ICT
standards in place:
• Very few classrooms are without an
interactive whiteboard or projector;
• More schools are experimenting with
one-to-one programs involving tablets;
• Almost every school has a VLE, with
many using it to actively engage parents;
• Many classrooms have a plethora of other
equipment, such as digital recorders,
pocket camcorders, digital cameras, and
document cameras to name just a few.
Recently, a law related to the ICT curriculum
was “disapplied.” This means that while schools
still have to make sure they teach kids how to use
educational technology, they can do so how they
like. Teachers do not have to implement ICT
based on how a previous government thought
they should. Once you add an increasing interest
in teaching computer programming, and several
national schemes, pilots, and initiatives for ICT
and programming, you have an almost tangible
buzz of excitement about the possibilities.
As a school principal said to me recently,
“Funding educational technology is not a
question of budgets but of priorities.”
Terry Freedman is an independent educational
ICT consultant. He publishes the ICT in Education
website at http://www.ictineducation.org, and blogs
at http://www.techlearning.com/section/Blogs.