ICT in learning and teaching
Findings from qualitative research
The action planning process in ICT Test Bed schools and colleges
Production of detailed Action Plans by each school and college during the autumn of 2002 comprised the first major phase of ICT Test Bed Project work. Heads of schools were supported by their LEAs, and Becta staff provided further support to both schools and colleges. The completed Action Plans were summarised by a member of Becta staff and presented to the DfES for Ministerial approval during the early months of 2003. The value of this planning process was investigated through telephone interviews with 17 volunteer heads and college managers in the summer of 2003.
Action planning was seen as useful because it immersed heads of schools and college managers in the project, helping them to clarify their thinking and begin to understand the scale of the undertaking. Nevertheless, for many the production of the plans had been a time consuming and frustrating process (in many cases involving much re-writing) and the resulting documents were seen as too long, too vague (several new managers coming into ICT Test Bed institutions said they were not able to understand what was required from reading them), and more suited to the purposes of the DfES than the schools themselves. A major difficulty was that the ICT Test Bed action planning process had to be carried out quite separately from the existing School Development Plans, using an electronic template which was described as 'tricky' to use. In two of the LEAs, once the plans had been submitted to the DfES, schools undertook the important task of integrating them with other existing plans (SDPs and specialist school proposals) to produce an implementation plan, and these were described as being of much greater value.
There was also the problem that plans did not allow for delays in the procurement and installation of equipment, many of which could have been predicted on the basis of the experience of previous large-scale ICT initiatives, such as the National Grid for Learning. The frustrations of delay became additionally stressful as a result of the impression gained by heads, college managers and their staff that the DfES was looking for measurable improvements in children's national test scores and examination results within as short a time frame as a single year.
Action planning for such a large-scale ICT-based project aimed at whole-school improvements also proved to be extraordinarily difficult for the majority of heads and their staff (and college department heads and staff) because they were unable to imagine what was possible and lacked basic knowledge of available hardware and software. Advice from third parties, such as that given by Becta, was only of limited help. As one head said:
The action planning was done at a very early stage and perhaps before we had a clear idea of where we were going. It's only now that we know what an ICT-rich school might look like. So it was quite a flawed process at the start. We know now - it's developed - we've put the vision into place afterwards. It was a strange way of going about something - but as a group we were pulled together for something we hadn't planned for.
Theories drawn from socio-cultural psychology (for example, Cole, 1999, p.91) point to the need for people to develop interior cognitive artifacts of new tools such as ICT devices before they are able to use them. These mental models allow people to imagine the possibilities for use and they are more important than the acquisition of ICT skills because the latter are easily acquired once the mental model is in place and has given purpose, and hence high levels of motivation, to using ICT. Thus the development of vision requires time and the kind of training that is focused on building individuals' mental models. The visit of the heads in one of the clusters to an innovative primary school in Birmingham in the autumn of 2002 was a good example of this kind of vision-building training and had clear beneficial outcomes.
Integrally linked to this difficulty in developing vision was the difficulty in foreseeing the workload which would be involved in implementing ICT Test Bed. Almost all heads underestimated the demands it would make on managers and it was clear that those schools which had chosen to appoint a full-time ICT Test Bed manager were able to implement the work of the project much more quickly. In one LEA many heads felt they had made a mistake in not doing this from the start. Where the major management responsibility was retained by the heads rather than being vested in an LEA ICT Test Bed Manager, the project continued to make considerable demands on their time throughout the whole of the first eighteen months.
Procurement and installation of complex networked software systems
In all three LEAs procurement of complex networked software systems proved very challenging and time-consuming. Two purchased new management information systems (MIS) and the third took the decision to upgrade the existing system. Two purchased virtual learning environments (VLEs) to provide a shared resource for all ICT Test Bed schools. In all cases the procurement process for VLEs or MIS took many months.
The choice of VLEs was complicated by the fact that the purchase involves the supplier 'supporting you to develop' it by 'customising it and reflecting the needs of the institution wherever they are placed.' It is not a simple matter of purchasing a completed product. The decision requires a fine balance between going for a system which appears to be 'visionary / out of the box' or one which demonstrates 'concreteness' and appears more likely to be reliable. In one LEA negotiations spanning many months broke down when the contractor failed to provide the promised evidence of the system in use in a secondary school. This meant that negotiations had to begin again with a new contractor: the order was eventually placed in March 2004 and the system installed on school servers in July 2004. The second LEA did not have the same problem of a contractor failing to supply but still only managed to install the VLE and start a pilot project in its use in March 2004. Thus, these complex systems were not in place for teachers to begin experimental use until almost half way through the funded period of the ICT Test Bed Project. This is a factor that must be kept in mind when evaluating the impact of such systems in terms of the ICT Test Bed aims.
The choice of an MIS was if anything even more difficult and complicated. All three LEAs had an existing MIS in use by all schools, which acted as a conduit of information, including financial information, between schools and the LEA. However, these systems did not have the functionality required to meet the needs of the ICT Test Bed home-community links theme. The ICT Test Bed vision was for parents to be able to access information on the school's server, such as their child's records, from home. Some new products recently developed offered a much greater degree of functionality than their existing systems. However, in the two LEAs where the ICT Test Bed schools opted to purchase a new system there were problems in transferring schools' financial information onto it. Financial information has to be totally secure at all times, and Council financial services are set up to deal with all schools using the same system, not to work with different systems for different sub-sets of schools.
In the procurement of MIS the decision-making processes in ICT Test Bed illustrates very well the problems of large-scale system change in which the level of prior investment centrally in the 'old' ICT system - and its embedding over several years in the larger infrastructure (procedures, jobs specifications, quality procedures) - makes it extremely difficult for those who operate the system centrally to introduce a change even if the local users perceive that they need improved facilities. When such a change is made there is an inevitable period of disruption while new infrastructures are introduced to accommodate it. In the case of ICT Test Bed this was evident in the decision in one LEA to keep schools' financial information on the old system and operate this alongside the new MIS; and in the decision in the other LEA to transfer only a small number of schools to the financial system while requiring them to maintain the old system as well for a considerable period of time. Meanwhile, the LEA that decided to upgrade its old MIS so that it incorporated the same facilities as the competitor product was kept waiting for many months by the contractor who proved unable for whatever reason to deliver the upgrade to the agreed time-scale.