Proposal & Rationale

Following the Government's announcement of its intention to close Becta, the significant reductions in the Harnessing Technology budget and the subsequent cancellation of much of the BSF programme, many of us working in the educational technology field have been talking about what the potential impacts on children, young people and staff might be at the level of schools and colleges. For those of us working at Local Authority level, the need to support schools in their ongoing adoption and development of technology to support learning remains a critical one. Many of us share a commitment to ensuring all our schools and colleges are digitally literate as well as confident, able to critically use technologies to for effective, creative and safe learning and active community participation. Effectively using technology for learning is something that an increasing number of  teachers do very well. School administration, communications, and infrastructure are also critical areas where we can find some of the best examples of practice in the world. However, without networks to support and develop practice, individual efforts are isolated and decision making may suffer.

In the light of this, it makes sense to begin to look at ways that we can use technology to facilitate a new network of education technology professionals working at Local Government level. Making our expertise, conversations and concerns visible means that we can begin to share practice and work with, not just alongside, each other.

Our proposal is to set up a grass-roots national network of people working within Local Authorities to support each other in decision making, profesional development, in sharing our experiences of what does and doesn't work and where needed, in bringing about meaningful change at Local Authority level. We aren't proposing a national representative body or replacement for Becta - we do think that a federation of LA employees offers a realistic approach to making best use of resource and capacity.

Real change can only happen at local level - it needs the whole community's interest and support - and no-one who has actually tried to make the phrase 'whole community participation' a reality takes the task lightly. We need to share what has worked for us, as well as what hasn't worked, and we need to be developing our own skills by listening and learning from each other. Our proposal is for a national network provides a forum for the exchange of information, ideas, expertise and debate. 

LA workers should be embedded in the communities they support. As such we hope that the network will also provide opportunities to other members of our community - school employees, teachers, leaders, librarians, technicians. Our role is to facilitate and support communications across our localities - an organised network also offers us the oppertunity to extend local capacity and connect people nationally.

We also think that the network needs to model what it preaches, and utilise technology not for its own sake, but because we recognise the social, cultural and economic opportunities that will be squandered at individual, local, national and international level if we don't.