Teachers helping teachers, schools assisting schools. That’s the philosophy behind a major ICT initiative that brings schools together via an online database. The ICT Register is an initiative by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) and supported by the DfES and Becta (British Educational Communications technology Agency). It’s an inter-school ICT support service that is open to all primary, secondary and special schools in England. “The Register began as a pilot in East Midlands two years ago, involving 19 schools,” explains Ken Walsh, associate director SSAT, “we thought it was a great idea for enhancing computer expertise.”
The scheme works like this. If your school meets certain criteria (see The ICT Register website for more details) and has a particular ICT skill, expertise or experience that you are willing to share with other schools, it can become a registered school and is added to the database. At the time of writing, there were 275 active schools on The ICT Register, 200 of them secondary schools. Registered schools can offer help in one or more areas of ICT expertise covering strategic, learning and teaching, technical, finance/budgeting, internationalism and special educational needs (SEN). The ICT Register offers around 1,400 separate services which cover everything from classroom teaching with ICT to leasing to developing a website for SEN children. “A Register school is free to choose what services it offers – it decides what its capabilities are – and how it delivers them,” adds Ken Walsh. For example, support might be in the form of telephone support for technical problems, via email, on-site school visits or even training courses which other schools pay for.
Any school looking for advice or guidance can find potential support schools in a number of ways. One way is to click on a map which splits England into regions This lets you instantly view a list of local schools that offer support and the type of support they can provide. Schools can not only read about the support but how they can gain access it. Services can also be searched for by school post code or by entering a search word. For example, when I typed in “laptops” in the services search box and clicked on “secondary schools”, I was presented with a list of 50 schools offering help such as how to avoid some of the pitfalls when purchasing laptops; setting up a network and using pupil data to improve achievement.
“Someone once said that the best way of embedding any change is through peer-to-peer self-organisation,” adds Ken Walsh, “and this is what the ICT Register is about. It’s by schools for schools. Schools don’t just talk about their successes, but also their problems and how they overcome them. It’s about learning from each other, including the mistakes.”
The SSAT is looking to expand the number of primary schools on The ICT Register to around 100 (there are about 70 at present), although there will be an upper limit of Register schools so that the database doesn’t become too unwieldy. There are also plans to include City Learning Centres on the database and at BETT, The ICT Register will be expanded to include international schools in countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, China and the USA. “Obviously most of the support on offer will be online, but there’s a lot we can learn from schools in other countries and vice-versa. For example, there’s a school in China that has a great home-school link for parents,” says Ken Walsh.
Ken Walsh adds that schools like using The ICT Register because: “When schools communicate with other schools, they’re really honest about what’s going on. It’s not a case study site that just tells you about the great things, but it’s about the warts and all, and that’s the great thing about it.”
