ICT and workforce development
Summary of findings from qualitative research
ICT Test Bed provides the opportunity to see if ICT can be used to improve the efficiency of workforce deployment and, as a result, improve the working conditions of teachers and the educational service provided to pupils. Matters of particular interest to policy makers are the potential for ICT to:
- reduce teachers' workloads
- enable teachers to share resources and re-use them
- enable staff with different roles to work more flexibly together
- increase the efficiency of record keeping and retrieval of records.
This is a developing area of ICT Test Bed work which has depended on the installation of new resources, such as management information systems with better functionality than previous MIS, and the development of new working practices. The examples of good practice in this report suggest that considerable gains are likely to be achieved over the next two years.
A large number of teachers and some classroom assistants have been given a laptop for their own personal use and find that this makes it easier to prepare lessons and carry out administrative tasks efficiently. Staff also find 'memory sticks' (sometimes called 'thumb drives') are an easy way of transferring files between home and school.
The technology-rich schools and colleges in ICT Test Bed have an increased need for good technical support, because once it is the norm to conduct lessons using ICT, any breakdown in the equipment or the network is extremely disruptive. In-house technical support has therefore proved to be essential, so that technicians can solve technical problems quickly and easily.
Considerable time savings have already been made in those schools where teachers are able to store and access information directly on the school server. Where a teacher's computer is also linked to whole-class technologies this information can be collected communally, for example during registration, and pupils can easily be given reminders. Pupils also find it very helpful when information and 'reminders' are displayed on interactive whiteboards. In one school which had moved to electronic lesson planning, the head had surveyed staff and found evidence that it reduced their workload.
Teachers are investing considerable energy in creating resources for teaching. In the study of teaching with whole-class technologies (see Teaching and Learning above) the evaluators observed teachers with very high skill levels in finding, creating, putting together and manipulating web-based resources, digital and scanned images, sound etc. It was often difficult to distinguish between these resources and commercial products. Given many teachers' expressed lack of knowledge and experience with ICT prior to the start of ICT Test Bed, their confidence and competence with technology is remarkable. Teachers justify their time investment in producing resources because such resources can be shared and also stored for future use.
The selection of resources from the increasing body of material available on the internet or school and college intranets is posing a growing problem. This is time consuming for individuals and some form of critical appraisal and annotation is essential, but it is not easy, particularly as teachers work in different ways, with very different pupils and have different needs. In some ICT Test Bed institutions, subject coordinators or departmental or college ICT champions are taking on some of these responsibilities.
A case study was carried out of technicians' work in one cluster where newly-appointed ICT Test Bed technicians had been required to attend a classroom assistant training course to broaden their role. This was a particularly interesting initiative although it was not possible to identify any clear outcomes. One thing learnt was that when providing such training it is important to make explicit links between the broad support role and technicians' primary role of ensuring the functionality of equipment. Technicians in our study were proud of their technical expertise and conscious of having a heavy workload, hence they did not express much interest in carrying out learning support work. Several heads also expressed reservations about any widening of the technicians' role. Nevertheless, some technicians said they enjoyed assisting teachers in their use of new software and equipment, and in practice, whatever their expressed opinions; they all described taking part in a range of activities in which they supported learners who were using ICT equipment.
Another case study was carried out involving two schools in which learning support assistants had been given laptop computers for their use both at work and at home. The changes which this brought about in their working practices and ICT skills were generally positive and suggest that this work should be extended and/or better embedded. In one school, where the work was focused on a clearly defined team supporting children from minority ethnic families, considerable gains were achieved in efficiency (particularly in storing and accessing pupils' individual records) and motivation. In the other school, where laptops were given to all LSPs, the need to introduce new procedures and provide training for such a large, diffuse group was challenging and only limited progress was made in the first year. There are some health and safety issues to be addressed in relation to both the weight of laptops and vulnerability to attack and theft. Some LSPs preferred to use a memory stick to transfer files between their laptop at school and computer at home.