The Department for Education in England is running an exercise to identify schools that can be used to share their expertise in education technology with other schools. Successful applicants will be given a ton of money.

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it. Let’s overlook the fact that the idea sounds rather like the Beacon Schools initiative, which fellow traveller DS reminded me about (although that scheme was less narrow in scope). Forget that the old Specialist Schools and Academies Trust had a similar scheme (although I was always sceptical of its efficacy because the expert schools were self-identified). Never mind that the LGfL has a cloud champion schools scheme. And please don’t dwell on the possibility that, because of the impending (I have chosen the correct word) general election, the scheme may never come to fruition anyway. Let’s just be grateful that the DfE has woken up to the fact that education technology can be quite useful, and even has a strategy for it.

If I sound like an old curmudgeon (less of the ‘old’ if you don’t mind), it’s because of the details. Specifically, the following conditions ring alarm bells with me:

First, an Ofsted rating of Good or Outstanding. When I was an ICT advisor in a very poor (I’ll return to this in a moment) London borough, some of the schools demonstrating the best use of education technology were the ones deemed by Ofsted to have been failing. They regarded education technology as a possible passport to better times.

I agree with the condition that schools have to have achieved a leadership rating of Good or Outstanding, because you can the best kit in the world, but if the senior leadership team is not interested in it and has no idea of the possibilities it opens up, putting more money into ed tech probably won’t achieve very much. Well, not compared with what it could achieve with a better senior leadership team at least.

Secondly, for schools teaching Key Stage 4 National Curriculum, a key criterion is the percentage of students taking the EBacc. This is an arbitrary, artificial and supposedly voluntary “qualification”. But under this criterion, a school could be offering its students a fantastically broad and dynamic curriculum, ideally tailored to the school’s intake, with lots of students going on to university, but would fail to get through because it offers the “wrong” subjects, or the right subjects in the wrong proportions.

I mentioned a moment ago that the area I worked in was very poor. This is very important because of a concept known as “ecological validity”. That is to say, I want to see education technology working well in a school like mine, where the paint is peeling off the walls and the computers are 6 years old and knackered. Show me what a school like that has done, and what it intends to do when it has more money, and I’ll be interested. As the singer Sugar Pi de Santo sang, if you know how to use what you have, then your size doesn’t really matter (paraphrased from her song, Use What You Got). (I feel I should point out, in the interests of transparency, that I don’t think she was referring to education technology, but the principle is a good one.)

On that note, the Innovate My School people have launched a portal where you can find schools just like your own in terms of their characteristics and the education technology products they use. I tried it, and at first glance it seems pretty good.

So,, back to the Demonstrator schools idea. If I were still a Head of Computing I would apply for it if my school met the criteria, because having a vision and money with which to realise it is better than having a vision without any money. So by all means apply for it if you can. I do hope it will prove to be beneficial to schools as a whole. My worry is that the scheme will turn out to be as beautifully designed but as little used in practice as the empty bench shown here.