ICT in institutional links with home and community
The vision of ICT in homes overcoming social disadvantage
All schools
This is the area of ICT Test Bed project work where progress has been slowest. In part, this reflects the complexities of putting home-school electronic links into place, and in part, the schools' natural inclination to focus energy initially on the embedding of ICT within all aspects of their own internal work.
Maturity modelling of the schools in the summer of 2005 showed that most institutions are working towards having websites that can at the very least be used to advertise the activities within the institution, that parental and community access to resources within the institutions is growing, and that while the use of electronic communication between the home and school is still in the emergent phase, some institutions are actively encouraging this form of communication.
The ICT Test Bed project set out to overcome disadvantage for children in areas of socio-economic deprivation. Prior to its launch there had been considerable interest among policy-makers in the possibility of overcoming social disadvantage by placing computers and appropriate electronic resources in students' homes (Hallgarten 2000; DfES 2002). The home-school links aspect of the project's work, therefore, had this as one of its aims.
At the outset of the ICT Test Bed project, in the autumn of 2002, two of the three clusters aimed to establish electronic links between schools and students' homes, and make both information and learning resources accessible by parents and students from homes. The third cluster, perhaps because of the poor infrastructure available in a rural area, decided to adopt a more piecemeal approach to using ICT for home-school links, for example, including purchasing laptops to be loaned to children to take home. At the end of six months, one of the clusters had established that the cost of placing computers in students' homes would be well beyond their budget. This cluster had three secondary schools and it was a useful lesson that costs of placing computers in homes are related to school size.
In the second cluster the roll-out of computers into homes was well organised and efficient and initially created considerable excitement from children and goodwill from parents. Considerable resources of time and money have also been put into the development of a VLE to be accessible from both schools and homes. However, substantial difficulties have been encountered in providing homes with connectivity and the VLE is not yet established as a fully functioning resource for teaching and learning.
ICT Test Bed primary schools already have well-developed communication strategies with their parents which may reduce the perceived need for the new system. Several ICT Test Bed primary schools in the other two clusters developed the use of classroom and/or school-wide servers and procedures for storing files and electronic resources which provided staff and students with some of the same facilities as a VLE at a much lower cost.
This is an area of work which will be a focus for evaluation during the final year of the ICT Test Bed project.
Further education colleges
External ICT linkage is strongest in the three FE colleges which have traditionally worked closely with the community through work placements of their students. They all have websites that provide information about the college, its courses and activities, as well as facilities for students to access the VLE from outside the college and download resources. Evidence from VLE logs and interviews with system administrators and staff showed that, by the autumn of 2005, there was regular use of the VLE in more than half of the ICT Test Bed curriculum areas and it was well integrated into the course structure/materials. Students interviewed in the summer of 2005 were able to talk in detail about how they used the particular system in their college. However, students' use of the VLE from home is less frequent than in college. Colleges see establishing links with parents as irrelevant to their business as their students are in the post-compulsory sector.