ICT and inter-institution collaboration
Overall progress
Between 2002 and 2005 there has been a transformation in the electronic infrastructure linking schools and colleges within the clusters and in the use made by all staff of electronic communications within and between institutions. This is one way in which ICT Test Bed has ensured that educational provision in these three areas of socio-economic deprivation matches the best standards nationally.
Electronic links within schools and between ICT Test Bed schools and colleges were not well developed at the beginning of the project. When the evaluators began work in the spring of 2003, the email system in one of the clusters was not reliable and headteachers and project managers routinely used private email addresses in preference to their LEA address. In the other two clusters, email links were fully functional in schools but were not the preferred means of communication for most members of staff. At that time email communications with all ICT Test Bed schools had very variable response rates and the evaluators often followed up emails with phone calls. In the summer of 2003 the great majority of schools and colleges chose to complete paper-based questionnaires rather than teachers and students responding online.
Across all ICT Test Bed institutions there has been a steady rise in the maturity of their in-house and inter-institutional links. Servers and networks are generally functioning well and their use, as appropriate, is well established for the majority of staff. Questionnaires are now routinely completed online by both staff and students. These are considerable achievements, involving changes to working practices at many levels.
Using ICT for collaborative working
Primary schools
In all three clusters headteachers and primary staff have established close working relationships with each other and with the secondary and FE colleges. This collaboration has been assisted by electronic communications and often focused on staff development in the use of ICT and ICT-enhanced project work. Under the leadership of the headteachers, primary schools in one cluster have worked exceptionally closely together with clear benefits to staff morale and management efficiency.
Collectively, the primary schools are now all recording scores of three or above on Maturity Model 5 (internal linkage), indicating considerable progress. In real terms this suggests that staff now have easier access to information and formal records, and are able to share resources and expertise with colleagues in both their own school and other cluster schools.
Electronic links between the school and the LEA are now well established in all ICT Test Bed primary schools. Data required by the LEA or the DfES is routinely submitted electronically.
In the 2005 staff survey, primary teachers (73%) and support staff (71%) reported using ICT for joint planning of work. Collaboration in developing teaching materials for whole-class technologies and sharing of web-based resources are both now common among teachers and support staff in the primary schools.
Planning is now much more public and more corporate. In interviews, headteachers reported having easy access to lesson plans which are stored and collated in shared files on the school's server.
It looks unlikely, given the time taken to adapt and update teaching materials, that short-term planning time will be much reduced, but planning is certainly better and more detailed, often including samples of what pupils are expected to achieve. Medium and long-term plans are much easier to modify and bring up to date and this represents a growing saving of time and effort.
There has been some very interesting use of video conferencing during the third year of the project. (It was hardly used in years one and two because of 'innovation overload' with other ICT equipment.) Video conferencing has improved inter-school support mechanisms and the sharing of rare or particular expertise. For example, children in two primary schools held video-conferencing sessions with artists and story-tellers, followed up by a video conference between children in the two schools to share their responses. This was a completely new experience for the children and they responded very well to the sense of participating in a 'public' event.
Some primary schools are also seeking to use video conferences to link with other countries in order to develop citizenship. The schools in one cluster with a very low ethnic minority mix are also seeking to hold video conferences with other schools in order to ensure that multicultural issues are aired.
Secondary schools
In all of the ICT Test Bed secondary schools, ICT enables planning to be much more public. Senior managers are able to keep staff informed during the management planning process and have better access to both short and medium-term planning at departmental or year group level.
Inter-departmental co-operation in secondary schools is much more variable and has proved unlikely to happen without leadership from the senior management team.
Most secondary schools have developed good email links and now have a culture in which staff utilise this means of communication readily and regularly. However, this is not universal: at least one ICT Test Bed secondary school still relies on paper communications which leads to delays in information transmission.
In one cluster the ICT Test Bed secondary school has given very strong leadership to the cluster as a whole. During the first year its headteacher chaired cluster meetings and took a lead in driving forward the planning process (the role of chair subsequently moved to a primary headteacher). A common network infrastructure has been developed in this cluster and, although sharing of some MIS facilities made the system too slow and had to be abandoned, work has continued to develop a shared VLE and make this accessible to children from their homes. Problems have been encountered (which will be discussed in the next section of this report) but this aspect of the cluster's work will be a particular focus of the evaluation in the final year of the project.
Further education colleges
In FE colleges, tutors are often sole providers of a course which reduces the need to share teaching resources. In some ICT Test Bed course areas, however, there has been considerable sharing of skills and approaches to resource creation. In one college there is evidence of tutors from other course areas working in close proximity starting to use ICT for the first time as a result of seeing how it can be used.
In two clusters a corporate and co-ordinated approach has been taken to planning and resource creation/selection between ICT Test Bed schools with the support of the FE college, and this has been a useful lever for staff development. In one college, for example, a content development workshop has state-of-the-art IT equipment and is staffed by two content developers and a graphic designer. The aim is for teachers from the college and cluster schools to collaborate directly with e-learning developers, combining their knowledge of pedagogy and technology. The production of materials has proved time-consuming, however, and there is little evidence that much use has been made of them over time.
In another example, ICT has led to major savings in administrative time relating to setting up work placements in one of the colleges. The intention was to improve the operational communications with employers and partners working with the college's child care team (local schools, nurseries, elderly care homes, SureStart programmes, social services). Evidence from an action research study showed that in the first two terms there was a significant reduction in the administrative burden on the work placement officer and a significant cost saving in terms of telephone costs and employee time. The system required initial work to put it in place as some employers did not have an email facility, and some had email but their staff were not in the habit of checking it regularly. Significantly, some employers have now started to use email to contact the college.
The colleges have also started to use video conferencing more routinely. It is most valuable when there is real need. For example, in one college it was used for weekly teaching sessions with a class whose course tutor had emigrated to North America. The group was small (six) which helped to ensure good communications and email was used to follow up teaching sessions. Although this was an unusual situation, it provides an excellent example of the power of video conferencing to provide specialist teaching from a distance when no specialist teacher is available in the college.