Q&A: Becta's Niel McLean defends free PCs for kids

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A few years ago, we said that schools should be looking at open source. We want to see a mix, because we’re agnostic, but open source is certainly a credible alternative.

Now, we’d be wary about anything that put an additional technical burden on schools. Some of the things where it really works, like in higher education where they’ve gone heavily for open source, they’ve also got people who are developing the open source products and sharing and that sort of thing. That would be a minority sport in the average primary school. The average primary school needs a lot of support around any product.

One of the things we’d like to see is people supporting open source in schools so that it’s less dependent on the enthusiasms of the particular teacher. We’re seeing people starting to do that but at the same time we’ve got to recognise where the world is. There are habits out there that are going to take a time to change, and that’s just the facts of life.

You’ve seen a lot of schools. What do the most successful ones have in common?

The first thing that they’re doing is there school leadership and their governors have developed a vision for what they want their school to be doing with technology, they’re not just buying stuff.

If you were to give me only 10 minutes in a school, and I wanted to guess how good the ICT was, I would not go to where the technology is, I’d go to the head office - the deputy head office, the senior management team - and ask them a few questions. And that’s no different from any other organisation.

The second thing – and again, I’m not going to talk about technology – is the best schools have got a really clear focus on how they want kids to learn. Do they want their kids to learn collaboratively, individually, at home? They’ve got a view of learning, if that makes sense. And then what they’ve done is they’ve bought the technology that works with that.

There are other factors. They’ve professionalised their technical support, by either doing it in-house professionally and properly, or buying a service that does it. So there are a few features like that.

What else is there? When they do their curriculum plans, right at the outset they’re thinking about how they could use technology. They’re engaging parents, trying to engage parents by having after school sessions where they learn about technology.

It’s those sort of attributes. It isn’t that they’ve got some sort of technology like 3D or handhelds or whatever. They tend not to be the things that predict the difference. It tends to be the human behaviour, planning, that kind of thing that makes the difference.

There are other things, like teachers’ own access to technology. It’s no good parents being able to access the school after hours if teachers can’t.

It’s systematic, a vision - it isn’t that they’ve gone for a particular technology or technical route. That might turn out to be the case down the line, but that isn’t the case at the moment, it’s more about the people things.

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