Digital Revolution - Round 1

Last week the Australia Government announced the details for the first round of the "National Secondary School Computer fund" a program aimed at providing IT resources (mainly computers) to secondary schools.

The program is aimed at years 9 to 12, with an estimated $1.1 billion being provided over the next 5 years - round 1's aim is to change the student to computer ratio for schools that had a current ratio of 1:8 or worse to a target ratio of 1:2.

The basis of the fund is to provide $1,000 for a computer to schools to achieve this aim.

Last week the successful schools for round 1 were announced along with their computer allocation. I have taken this opportunity to break this detail out to see the full extend of the offering and to look at areas that have been missed.

Looking at the basic data, the top 20 schools in Australia to receive computers collected 8812 PC's for an average of 441 PC's per school, the total cost for the top 20 is $8,812,00. In pulling these details apart I am interested in the capacity for these schools to handle all these computers - the on costs that might be associated.

How does Bendigo Senior Secondary school go about placing, setting up, allocating, managing and providing professional development and training for an additional 774 computers in the school. I think the work and effort for the school must be huge, granted getting that many machines means a lot more access to technology (1:2) for students and teachers. I also feel sorry for this school, within the Victorian system schools are connected to the Victorian government wide area network with fibre connections, unfortunately the Education Department/Vic Government then make the school pay for downloads through a rage of ISP's, which means schools are always looking at their usage based on their download plans and how much it will cost rather than using the internet  for educational purposes without having to worry about download costs. So imagine the issues some of the school face with additional computers that can connect to the school network and then to the internet.

Top 20 Schools

• Bendigo Senior Secondary College - Government, Vic
• Balwyn High School - Government, Vic
• Essendon East Keilor District College - Government, Vic
• All Saints College - Catholic, NSW
• Cherrybrook Technology High School - Government, NSW
• Lilydale High School - Government, Vic
• Oakhill College - Catholic, NSW
• Wantirna College - Government, Vic
• Westfields Sports High School - Government, NSW
• Glenunga International High School - Government, SA
• Strathmore Secondary College - Government, Vic
• Doncaster Secondary College - Government, Vic
• Grace Lutheran College, Rothwell - Independent, Qld
• Kiama High School - Government, NSW
• St Francis Xavier's College - Catholic, NSW
• Henry Kendall High School - Government, NSW
• Kepnock State High School - Government, Qld
• Gladstone Park Secondary College - Government, Vic
• Fairvale High School - Government, NSW
• Mowbray College - Independent, Vic

A full list in order of number of PC's allocated can be accessed here...Download digital_revolution_rd_1_school_order.pdf

I have taken all the details from the round 1 information and have counted up the total computers provided and worked out a few of the costs and details:

• Number of schools involved: 896
• Total number of PC's: 116,820
• Total Estimated cost: $116,820,000
• Number of students impacted: 233,640
• Number of teachers impacted: 9346

We can then break down this data further by sector:

• Government Schools received - 71% (82,482 PC's, worth $82,482,000)
• Catholic Schools received - 19% (22,571 PC's, worth $22,571,000)
• Independent Schools received - 10% (11,767 PC's, worth $11,767,000)

Extending the Equation

The following is an extension of the round 1 data that the Australian Government has not calculated into this digital revolution and I hope that you see the picture of what challenges we as educators, school leaders, students and parents face.

Given the details, I have made a number of estimates and assumptions around 3 key issues that the federal government  has not considered in providing financial support. The 3 key areas are:

• Technical Support
• Professional Learning and Support
• Required Infrastructure

With each of these areas I have placed a monetary value on the service required to support just these new PC's being provided to schools:

• Technical - a ratio of 1 tech to every 50 PC's on a salary of $60,000 including on-costs (super etc)
• PL & S - to enable successful use of these devices then fully 1/3 of total funding should be allocated for professional learning and support
• Infrastructure - these computers will each need one power point and network point both priced at $50 per each installation

There are areas in my calculations that do not take into account school management and administration, government administration, servers, software, growing internet services and network upgrades (to name but a few).

Using these details the federal government really needs to up the ante and find the following to support schools implement and use these computers in a meaningful way with their students:

• Technical staff required: 2336
• Technical support staff costs: $140,184,000
• Professional Development costs: $38,940,000
• Infrastructure costs: $11,682,000

These figures equate to a total requirement for round 1 of $307,626,000 which is $190,806,000 more than allocated by the government. Overall these extra key areas represent an increased difference of 163%. We are talking huge numbers here and these missed areas constitute a major oversight by the government.

• So who carries these additional costs?
• What programs are impacted at State, regional and school level to support this initiative?
• What could we do with this money if educators and students were better consulted?

If anything I hope that this post makes you think about what is happening - remember we are only currently talking about secondary schools - primary schools have not been involved yet. Please pass this onto fellow teachers, students and parents to discuss and talk about. I am not sure this is the best option for us in Australia. What do you think?

Here is the State/Territory break down of my calculations...Download digital_revolution_rd_1_extending_the_details.pdf

Comments

[Rob McTaggart]

You make some very interesting points.

In my (limited) experience, the pedagogy’s not there to properly utilise these resources. You can spend enough money for every student to have five laptops, but if the teachers don’t have the extensive knowledge not just of how to use the computers, but how best to utilise them educationally, then there is little benefit for such big expenditure.

I’m not certain of your ratio of 1 tech to every 50 PC's, I’d say maybe 1 to 100 or 200, but then that is not what’s most important. Techs in schools would be far more beneficial if they had knowledge of pedagogy. They could make school networks far more useful, and get the educational tools to the students’ and teachers’ fingertips. They would then be the people on the frontline of training teachers to best use technology to better education for their students.

Perhaps we need a degree in our universities that marries education and IT?

Keep on analysing, though. There’ll be a lot of happy people about this fund but the wasted resources due to lack of teacher training is going to anger me. The funding needs to be spent on training and research more than computers (but the computers are necessary too!). I think I might do some student-led studies into just how much money and electricity is wasted while their school computers sit idle. :)

[Tony]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the comment. You make some very interesting points and areas which I plan to follow up with further details and costings. In regards to the technical support I used basic commercial ratios for this and what we tend to forget is that in the business and commercial worlds the applications and uses of PC's are generally 1/4 of what we would expect to do in education so the ratio should be a lot higher for education.

The other thing we need to consider is that traditionally as educators we put up with limited technical support and if we want to increase it the school generally needs to be either inventive with resources or have the capacity to find room for additional staffing. This should not be the case we should not get second class technical service when such a large investment is made. I would be in favour of the government providing funds under this program to use it to develop student skills in providing technical support - so that get recognition and support in filling this role. That way when these students leave school, if they wish to go into the IT area they already have a a hands on understanding of a support role.

And whilst professional learning should be high, too many times I visit schools that have teachers disengaging with technology becasue it does not work and the teachers that should be leading and providing professional learning and support are at their wits end trying to fix the problems to enable the teachers to engage so that they can then start to look at providing professional learning...... I know you get this picture but our friends in government and state departments do not.

I would love to see the details of the energy use and consumption from your students. I did look to go down this path but like a lot of things I ran out of time.

When I worked in the NT education Department one of the things I wanted to get going was to use the idle machines at night or when not is use to do large scale processing (i.e. SETI program) that could be on sold to large business that needed raw number crunching. The money that could be made from this could then be funneled back into support, professional learning and more resources if required. These are the things we need to start looking at to make IT in school continually viable without the need for large cash injections that so far miss the mark.

Or we could wait for technology to become so cheap we just expect our students to buy and bring it in and all we have to do is provide internet and infrastructure access!!

Thanks Again - I will get off my soap box.

[Mark]

Quite a good post on getting people to think about the hidden costs of the education revolution. While I do agree with you in that providing the actual computers is only part of the cost, I think the costings are a bit excessive.

I tend to agree with Rob in regards to the tech ratio. While 1-50 may be the commercial standard, I truly don't believe that it is necessary to have that many techs in a school. It would mean that Bendigo Senior Secondary school would receive an extra 15 techs over and above what they already have (assuming they have any).

Also, I don't know about the costings for Professional development. On those figures, it works out at over $150,000 for each of the schools receiving computers. Schools aren't able to give the release time for all staff to go to a number of outside PD sessions on ICT over and above other PDs. While money does need to be allocated for Professional Development, surely a range of presenters/consultants could inservice staff during curriculum days.

One thing that is not mentioned in your post is the electricity capacity of the school. There have been times at my school where we have had blackouts because we couldn't handle the capacity for computers, lights, air-con etc... To get another unit (transformer??) is apparently mega-bucks. That is something that hasn't been budgeted for also.

[Tony]

Mark your comment about the power and utility issues is a good one, and having that many techs would be over kill in the majority of schools but the issue is around the fact that these are fundamental requirements to make all this work and they are not be factored in.

With the money for professional development for schools and the $150,000 you mention - that in reality equates to only one staff member on say $70,000 plus on costs for a total of $90,000, with the remainder for resources, activities, equipment etc. This money could also be used to employ a floating teacher or staff to release other teachers to plan, or develop skills or write up programs/activities or undertake work with students. Schools could even use this money to employ other teachers to provide a Google model of 80% on class teaching based activities with the remaining 20% on special projects or activities.

Thanks for your input into the discussion.