Alan’s Blog

Good news – On Tuesday of this week the Education IT Group approved two new Schools Based ICT Officer posts. This will bring the IT team supporting ICT in the schools up to six (the initial number requested 3 years ago!). Given the elongated recruitment processes of the Council I would hope we would have people in post sometime around Christmas.
 
At the same meeting I tabled an update report on ICT support for schools. In my next few blog entries I thought it might be of interest to share some of the statistics contained in that report (and a few others besides). What I’d like to do is to stimulate some debate about how ICT support for schools in East Lothian could be provided in the future. All ideas are welcome.
 
The first table below shows the number of helpdesk calls placed by schools that were dealt with by the Desktop Services Team in each of the last 3 school years. The second breaks these down by sector. In each case they cover the period 1^st August – 31^st July.
 
Total number of jobs raised
2003/04 school year = 2257
2004/05 school year = 3268
2005/06 school year = 3036
 
                                Secondary            Primary                   Nursery
2003/04                   1483                        737                          37
2004/05                   2084                        1127                        57           
2005/06                   1496                        1472                        68
 
The first point to note is that overall the number of jobs dealt with by our desktop services team was down by 200 on the previous year – it certainly didn’t feel like this during the year!
Most strikingly jobs raised by secondary schools were down by almost 600. This figure really surprised us but when we investigated further it transpired that almost 500 of these “missing” jobs were in the periods either side of the term breaks when schools when schools were preparing to undergo extensive PPP works or had come back to the results of the works.
 
Whilst the loss of the PPP related jobs has been excellent news for us (and the schools concerned), it has been offset by a huge increase in jobs raised by Primary Schools (a 30% increase from 1127 to 1472). Neither ourselves in IT nor Karen and her team in Education are surprised at this rise.  The number of staff in Primary schools actively using ICT in the classroom has really taken off in the last year and is something that Karen and her team should feel justifiably proud of.
 
Jobs in the Primary schools invariably take longer to deal with owing to the number of schools (35 primary compared to 6 secondary) and the traveling involved between jobs. Added to this the infrastructure in the primary schools is more complex with greater use of mobile technology and all the issues that this brings.