"Smart" society and how not to achieve it!

I note from a report in the Irish times on Tuesday, November 17^th that there is to be a new €150m investment in “smart schools”, providing every classroom in the country with a laptop and digital projector. Does anyone else wonder at the timing of such an initiative, just prior to a budget that is likely to contain many cutbacks to an education system that is already one of the worst funded within the OECD?

This “initiative” would seem less cynical if it were part of an overall plan, but sadly the only policy document the DES ever produced was in 1997, Schools IT 2000 - A Policy Framework for the New Millennium. That policy document was replaced by – nothing! There is no ICT policy in the DES. Some commentators speak of a lack of joined up thinking, but in reality there is no thought at all, just a tablula rasa.

The Digital Schools Initiative launched 2 years ago shows that the only vision for the use of ICT in schools is the vision of serving teachers who have worked bravely and ploughed a lonely furrow in recent years, despite no funding, in spite of clapped out computers and in spite of any policy directives from the DES.

ICT has a very broad role, as a set of enabling technologies and services that underpin the development of a country as an “information” or “knowledge” economy. An ICT capability in this sense is critical in achieving national goals in areas such as science, education and innovation. ICT teachers are worried at the complete lack of vision in terms of either policy or investment in technology in our schools.

In 2005, the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources announced an €18m investment — mostly stumped up by the telecoms industry — to deploy broadband in schools. That initiative led to a very patchy deployment of broadband to about 80% of schools, mostly in urban areas, leaving many rural schools with no connectivity. The schools broadband system gave a 1MB speed to primary schools and a 2 MB speed to post-primary, sufficient to allow a couple of computers to access the internet before “freezing” or crashing! Schools were expected to avail of broadband using old computers, most of them 8 or 9 years old. The sad reality is that those computers were not capable of using broadband; in fact they can’t operate modern educational software, which is probably just as well, because schools have received no funding since 2002 to purchase software, or to repair or upgrade outdated equipment.

Technology in education is a three-legged stool: you need infrastructure, you need to have technology ingrained in the curriculum and teachers need to see technology as part of their professional and personal development. If you are missing any of the legs the whole edifice comes crashing down.

We have a creaking, if not collapsing infrastructure at the moment because of the chronic lack of planned funding. What is urgently required, if politicians are serious about ICT, rather than being in the business of paying lip service to it, is a strategic plan along the following lines:

1. An ICT plan for primary education. How can any school Principal organize a coherent and integrated ICT plan for a school when there is no central ICT policy to refer to? We have had several years of in-service in which there has been no reference to ICT, bar the mention of a few websites. Much of the revised primary curriculum, in history, geography, local studies and SPHE is indigenous. Yet the DES has made no attempt to encourage or fund local indigenous software.

2. We need a five year policy framework with planned funding of €200m just to catch up with our neighbours in Europe. You might think €200m is a fanciful figure but as far back as 2006, IBEC was promulgating that the Government purchase laptops for every 2^nd level pupil in the country and that would have cost between €280m and €320m. The Fine Gael Party in 2007(?) produced a policy document calling for the government to give a laptop to every student entering secondary school (an investment of €38m in a single year). So €200 is indeed quite a realistic figure.

3. Training in the use of ICT for teachers is an imperative. The sad reality is that currently only about 5% of teachers use ICT daily as a curricular tool. ICT has to become an integral part of the professional and personal development of teacher training. Unless there is a concurrent rollout of appropriate professional development in the pedagogical usage of ICT, any initiative is doomed to failure.