ICT Support For Schools - Part 3

September 12th, 2006 · 12 Comments
Information · Support

I mentioned in my 2^nd post on this subject that we use the same helpdesk tool for schools as we do for corporate IT within the Council and that the classifications for jobs are constrained by the corporate settings. I thought it would be interesting to contrast the resources available to corporate and curricular ICT.

Currently supporting curricular ICT we have 4 school based ICT Officers, augmented by 2 IT Officers from John Muir House who are supposed to spend 50% of their time working in schools. There is further support for approximately 3 months of work from each of our 2 placement students. This amounts to 5½ FTE ICT support staff. They are supporting approximately 3900 curricular Apple Macs, PCs and laptops. This works out to approximately 709 computers per officer. With the two new posts this will reduce to about 520 computers per officer

Corporately the IT Division has 20 staff whose role includes providing desktop support to the corporate users. They are supporting approximately 2000 PCs and laptops. This works out to approximately 100 computers per officer.

It must be pointed out that this is a crude comparison as the exact roles and responsibilities of the two sets of staff are different. It does however highlight the resourcing differences and associated expectations between the corporate and curricular education sectors.

This differences between corporate and curricular ICT are not unique to East Lothian. Although the exact ratio of computers to support specialists may vary, all other authorities I am aware of have a similar difference. I would be interested to hear from anyone from other local authorities about their experiences in this area.

Corporately, East Lothian Council has taken part in the User Satisfaction Survey of Local Government IT departments run by SOCITM. These surveys are run every two years and get users to grade the importance and performance of a wide range of factors involved in the delivery of the IT service. The most recent one, completed in July of this year was the third East Lothian’s IT Division have undertaken and the results were good. The department’s overall score put them into the top 10% of authorities that have ever taken part in the survey. Despite the good overall score there is still room for improvement and we will be addressing this over the coming months.

SOCITM have recently announced that they are to run a similar survey focusing specifically on ICT for Education. We have signed up to take part and hopefully this will provide meaningful feedback from our users that will assist both Education and IT in developing the service for the future.

Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)

12 responses so far ↓

1 David Muir // Oct 11, 2006 at 7:49 pm

Hello there

I came to your blog via Ollie Bray’s. I don’t work in East Lothian (I’m a lecturer at Jordanhill), so you can feel free to ignore a nosey parker if you want…

I was surprised at the difference in ICT officer to computer ratios. I would be interested in an expansion of “It does however highlight the resourcing differences and associated expectations between the corporate and curricular education sectors.” The resourcing differences, at least in terms of IT Officers, is obvious but a bit more about “expectations” would be interesting. Is more expected from you from corporate because more has been given? Are the support issues at corporate level more mission critical - e.g. if the computer system falls over, nobody gets paid, whereas if the computing lab in a school falls over, in general it’s just that 3B gets grumpy because they have to do a book based lesson? Also, are the computers in one section spread out over a larger geographical area?

I am also curious as to the different types of problems your officers encounter in the different settings. For example, at the level of supporting dektop PCs, I would imagine that supporting a corporate user, with his or her own computer, using a limited range of software, that they use off and on throughout a typical working day presents very different challenges from supporting a PCs in a school lab that are used more or less constantly through the day by six or more different users who use many different packages. (Is this a true picture?)

I’ll ask the technicians at Strathclyde if there is a similar distinction between central services support (for registry and management etc.) and support for academics and students.

As I say, just curious, so feel free to ignore my ramblings.
2 alancruickshank // Oct 12, 2006 at 12:19 pm

David,

I’m delighted to see that I’ve attracted an audience wider than East Lothian.

I think the main reason for the imbalance in staffing between corporate and schools is that corporate computing is more mature than its education counterpart and that as time goes on the difference in ratios will come down.

Large scale networked computing in the corporate world has been around for 20 or more years, whereas East Lothians schools have only had whole school networks and large numbers of computers since 1999. Education’s focus to date has been to meet targets such as pupil/PC ratios hence budgets are focused on providing the hardware and software. Education computing is now reaching the point where staff are becoming more confident using their equipment and as a result start to become more reliant on it. The balance is changing from it being a nice toy that can assist the delivery of teaching and learning to it being a key part in the delivery process. This mirrors what happened in the corporate world with the advent of cheaper PCs and more reliable networks. IT became an integral part of the business and keeping the IT running became an essential part of keeping the business running. The relative importance of this is then reflected in the budgets allocated to it. I think Education is now reaching this point. The challenge it now faces is determining the relative importance of keeping the IT running (and deciding the level of support it wants/needs) against all its other commitments and allocating budget accordingly.

There are differences in supporting corporate and education IT. You have hit the nail on the head with the main difference between the two environments - i.e. corporately each PC is used by 1 user whereas in education each PC is used by many. Another is that when a device is faulty in a classroom we cant always get access to it during the day slowing down the support process.

Overall I wouldn’t say one environment was harder to support than the other but each has its own challenges that require slightly different strategies for supporting.
3 David Muir // Oct 12, 2006 at 2:42 pm

Thanks for a helpful and interesting reply. I’ll let you know if I get any relevant information from the technicians here at Jordanhill.
4 Penis Enlargement // Dec 30, 2006 at 5:23 am

Top 3 Penis Enlargement Pills, male enhancement and much more… visit: http://www.sinepenis.com
5 JohnPearson // Jan 25, 2007 at 6:21 am

Nice Post.

That was well said. Always appreciate your indepth views. Keep up the great work!

John
6 Male Enhancement // Feb 7, 2007 at 8:00 am

Here you will find articles penis about serious penis enlargement products and much more like penis conditions, erection, sexual health, sexuality, jelqing, penis enlargement pills. Visit: http://www.sinepenis.com
7 Penis Enlargement // Apr 19, 2007 at 4:34 am

Download 7 penis enlargement videos. User ratings & reviews of 55 penis enlargement pills.
8 Penis // Jun 4, 2007 at 8:09 pm

Here you will find articles penis about serious penis enlargement products and much more like penis conditions, erection, sexual health, sexuality, jelqing, penis enlargement pills. Visit: http://www.sinepenis.com
9 Weight Loss // Jun 17, 2007 at 7:10 pm

Weight Loss Reviews. Hoodia effortlessly reduce their caloric intake by 7000 calories each week. Visit: http://www.healthshop.tv
10 xxx video // Jun 19, 2007 at 8:38 am

xxx video

suppa post
11 Kurtis // Jul 7, 2007 at 12:24 am

Kurtis…

I read an article very similar to this on Myspace last night although it was not so detailed as yours…
12 Download free videos // Jul 9, 2007 at 4:24 pm

Download free videos…

The contemporary use of the term first appeared on Usenet groups…