BSF KO? OK!

2008-04-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

Great news today for people in UK educational IT. It seems that the money-wasting exercise that is BSF has waning vital signs. The Guardian write:

Plans to rebuild the entire school estate would be shelved and replaced with a speeded up version to prioritise a handful of new schools in each area, under proposals made by ministers.

BSF has followed a snaky path in the last 4 years and I couldn't be happier to see its decline. We've gone (IIRC) from:

All secondaries rebuilt by 2015

to:

All secondaries rebuilt or substantially refurbed by 2015

to:

All secondaries rebuilt or substantially refurbed by 2020

to:

All secondaries and half of primaries rebuilt or substantially refurbed by 2020

to:

"Every single local authority area will have BSF projects underway by 2020. Every single secondary will be rebuilt or refurbished in the longer term."

The most recent of those, announced last night, effectively means that the four or five weakest schools in each local authority as measured by GCSE performance will still be revamped. That work may not be a complete rebuild and the first brick may not have been laid even by 2020. The second sentence is laughable really - promising to tart up schools more than 12 years down the line is not much of a commitment.

Much has been said about BSF and it's probably a waste of breath to discuss it further, but this smells like a victory for common sense and decency over the evils of PFI (build now, pay forever) and outsourcing of public sector jobs (save pennies now, pay pounds forever).

VLE data storage

2008-04-10T10:05:00.001-07:00

Interesting idea from Bucks blogger Ian Usher about storage of data from VLEs. At the moment, each implementation has its own data silo which stands alone. Yes, some VLE suppliers make an effort to encourage sharing between schools, but when it comes to the primary-secondary transition (or when a pupil moves house to a different area) moving the data becomes a hideous manual chore.

Put simply, in my ideal world / parallel universe Becta would commission what might be the world's largest amount of online storage space (including hosting, backup, redundancy, whatever it takes) [...] Whatever size they decided it should be, it would be. Wherever it was sited, it would be sited.
What Becta would specify would be the ways in which this space could be accessed - i.e. the ways in which any tool would pass data to and from this space, using common (open) standards based methods.

Rather than proposing an export format (my first reaction, but very old-fashioned I must admit) he suggests a central government storage repository which VLE suppliers would [be forced to] hook into. I'll hold back on venting about how bad an idea it would be for BECTA to run it (or even be involved in any capacity)! I'd like to see a body like CETIS take something like this on - it could be truly amazing. I do worry whether anything that size could fly in .sch.uk as a single project - perhaps hosting at LEA level is more realistic and not greatly different in cost.

Sahmeepee's blog

BSF KO? OK!

VLE data storage