ICT IN PRACTICE AWARDS 2005 - LEADERSHIP, FOUNDATION AND PRIMARY WINNER
Harold Brownlow - Principal of Ballymena primary school, County Antrim

By Dorothy Walker

"We invest in people, not just technology," says Harold Brownlow, whose inspired leadership has sustained a highly successful campaign to help everyone in his school reap the benefits of ICT.

Harold is principal of Ballymena Primary School in County Antrim, and he believes that the key to sustaining ICT development is to take a team-based approach. He says: "We have a core ICT team of four - I am the ICT co-ordinator; a KS2 teacher is teacher-leader and spends time out of lessons helping colleagues, and two teachers provide KS1 input. If you rely solely on one ICT guru, the danger is that when that person goes you are left with nothing."

He believes strongly that staff should have opportunities to see ICT in action in other schools, and their wide-ranging research has included visits to classrooms in the USA. Harold says: "Attending a seminar is fine, but you can often learn a lot more by going and standing in someone else's school. We provide experiential learning for our children, and I believe the same should apply to teachers."

He is convinced of the benefits of putting computers within easy reach in the classroom, rather than always having to take children on a special trip to the ICT suite to "do computers". He says: "The ICT suite can provide benefits for whole-class teaching. But we have also installed eight or nine machines in every class, an arrangement which particularly suits infant classes, where groups of children work on different activities and one group can be working on the computers. We couldn't afford brand new systems, so I bought refurbished machines, which work perfectly well. Some people are besotted with computing power, but a primary school with a good software model can do a lot with older machines."

The latest initiative is CATAPULT (Children and Teachers and Parents Using Laptops Together), a scheme to provide all the school's key stage 2 pupils with one-to-one access to laptop computers. Begun a year ago with P6 pupils, it draws on extensive research, including a study tour of schools in New England made by Harold and five of his staff.

He says: "We looked at how laptops are deployed, because many schools are now using 'mobile suites' - trolleys of machines wheeled from class to class. But research showed that standards improved much more significantly when children each had a laptop all the time, for use in school and at home." Three classes are now enjoying the use of refurbished laptops which they take home regularly for homework, and parents are invited in to see the kind of work their children will be doing.

He says that maintaining progress on CATAPULT will depend on finding new ways to compensate for currently tight constraints on school budgets. "The art of sustainability is about being creative in finding external funding and trying to think imaginatively about how you use the funds you have."

Harold's use of eBay, the online auction service, illustrates the point. Having been successful in bidding for antique editions of newspapers for his school's new museum, he decided to use eBay to equip his staff with digital cameras. "We are part of the numeracy strategy, and all the teachers wanted a camera of their own so that they could keep a visual record of the numeracy activities pupils had been doing. Over the course of two or three weeks I was able to secure 11 second-hand Sony Mavica cameras for £70-80 each. They all work perfectly.

"We wouldn't be allowed to use funds from the school budget to buy from eBay - we have to use approved suppliers - but this was additional money we had raised from events such as an art exhibition, where parents bought pupils' paintings."

He sees ICT as a "fantastic tool" to bring a global dimension to the curriculum. Pupils have won international awards for their collaboration with schools in Germany, Greece and Finland, and projects range from writing poetry and book reviews to taking part in debates on sustainable development.

Harold's future plans major on the use of ICT to nurture creativity. He says: "To date we haven't been placing particular emphasis on creativity, and next year it will be the central plank of our school development plan.

We are looking at how art, dance, drama and music can be enhanced by the use of technologies such as digital video. We are even thinking about setting up a little television studio."

HAROLD'S TOP TIPS

• Develop team-based leadership to sustain ICT initiatives. We have a core
  ICT team, which includes me.
• Invest in people as well as technology - staff can learn so much by
  visiting other schools.
• Use ICT to take pupils beyond the walls of the school, developing a global
  dimension to the curriculum.
• Don't discard computers simply because they aren't the latest models. You
  can do a lot of good work with older machines.
• Don't take the children to the ICT - put the ICT with the children.

HAROLD'S TOP WEBSITES
Ballymena Primary School
Our own school site!

The Northern Ireland Network for Education (NINE) 
Provides support to help educators integrate ICT into the classroom.

WWF Learning
Online resource for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). We are currently piloting a WWF framework that helps schools audit how they teach ESD issues.

Global School Net
Site that helps schools collaborate on online projects - we have used it for a variety of collaborative exercises.

eBay
Thanks to this online auction site, we now have 11 excellent digital cameras bought for a total of less than £1,000, and all working perfectly.

HAROLD'S TOP TECHNOLOGIES
Classroom 2000 (C2K): Northern Ireland's managed ICT service for schools, which gave us a whole package of hardware, software and internet connectivity - phenomenally good. Simply cabling our building cost £60,000, which no school could afford from its own budget.

Laptops: Essential for giving children one-to-one access and allowing them to take machines home. The machines also help us make the most of our limited space.