Tell us a little about yourself.
Here I am, 45, mid-career, brought up in Yorkshire. Grammar school background, studied Latin and Greek. That’s where the interest in history came from - which now sits happily beside an interest in the digital future. A good deal of my career has been at the BBC, initially making programmes, later in management. I learned a lot, especially about how you take a large organisation, with lots of tradition, and square it up to the modern age. And how you evolve it to meet the changing expectations of its consumers.
What is your role at the Department for Education and Skills (DfES)?
I am director of technology and chief information officer. It’s a board-level role because ministers want to signal the importance of this area for the years ahead.
What are the priorities?
The aim is to use digital technology to modernise and personalise education for learners. So the first thing is coming to the rescue of the long-suffering head, baffled by the challenges of what to buy and how. Why can’t technology be like any other utility? Something you can switch on without fuss, without having personally to negotiate with technology suppliers across the globe.
The second thing is to work out how we can enable the head - or the college principal, or someone running a children’s centre - to embed technology into every aspect of the way their organisation works. Technology shouldn’t be so much shiny kit that isn’t used.
Third, and more difficult and long term, it is about genuinely realising personalisation and, above all, the personalisation of content. Huge advances have been made but we have to admit that much of the content is “one size fits all” - interactive yes, but not all that different from a digitised text book.
Finally, it is about how we use data. We have so much data in the system but what we can’t yet do is take a single comprehensive view of the individual learner, a view that combines all aspects of their development, from experiences in early years to learning attainment. This is a really huge task, and it bears on how we make sense of performance data across the system. That’s the chief information officer bit of the job. We have yet to find the way that learners can navigate their way through using the kind of learning style that they have. It's a huge challenge.
Will you deal with the BBC?
In the most obvious area, the Digital Curriculum [now being marketed as BBC Jam], I will not deal with it. My colleague Helen Williams will take forward the project of working with the BBC and I think that is right. In the broader sphere the answer is that, yes, I will work with the BBC and I will be thinking about the role of the BBC. I am not sure that the publicly funded asset holders in this country: C4, the BBC, the museums, libraries and archives have ever really made the massive contribution they could make to the English education system. There is a fantastic opportunity for these publicly funded organisations to work in partnership with the commercial organisations to bring all the content and talent to the education system to support both formal and informal learning. One of the many things that I would like to do in my new role is to see whether I can help take forward the big debates and to help shape new thinking and a bigger contribution from those who are interested in education but have been held at a distance from the educational system itself.
We have spent billions of pounds on ICT in schools - £1.65 billions is a figure that I have heard. Many would argue that such vast amounts have not produced good results.
The Government has put in a great deal, many millions as you say. But that’s exactly what it had to do to get the kit installed and the connectivity in place. I’d agree that so far we’ve had automation but not transformation. The really radical impact of the investment still lies ahead - the impact on children’s attainment or wider participation among those groups of young people currently switched off by the traditional offering. Those are the things we need to concentrate on now to capitalise on what we’ve spent.
Apparently there is going to be an emphasis on learning platforms - £20 million this year and £20 million next year. Why?
Yes, the department is committed to encouraging the adoption of learning platforms. Why? Because as far as we can see they will be a really important tool in personalising the learning experience of our children.
The platforms are going to allow us to assign the most appropriate interactive resources to the relevant children. They are going to allow us to assess how those children are doing on an individual basis in a way that can be shared with parents and carers. They will also give us the personalised learning space for the individual child, a route to the e-portfolio.
With the kind of agenda that ministers have now got, learning platforms look to be a key to opening up opportunities for individual learners, whatever their learning style.
If learning platforms are introduced badly it will be a bigger disaster than the New Opportunities Fund training. It’s a massive culture change. How do you ensure success?
The first step is to make the procurement much easier so that learning platforms become part of a wider approach to providing technology as a managed service. Schools can talk to their education authority or their Regional Broadband Consortium and say: “This is the functionality that I want. Would you get it for me?”
The self assessment framework which comes on screen in February is important in this. It will allow the head to assess where they are in their school in the use of technology and compare that with the best schools down the road or across the country. They can then work out a kind of plan to get the school up with the best. I think we have to take that idea further. We need to help heads to develop the plan for the school and recognise that it is going to have training and development facets within it. It is one thing assessing your needs; it is quite another satisfying them. We need to ask ourselves whether our current programmes of training and development are enough. They are very impressive: for example the program run by the National College of School Leadership is a very exciting way for heads to share what they have learned with their peers. It will reach 10,000 heads by March. How do we develop that approad and share it across the wider system?
With so many organisations involved in ICT: the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), Training and Development Agency for schools (TDA), Learning and Skills Council, National College for School Leadership (NCSL), technology agency Becta and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), a teacher or school might be forgiven for asking who is driving ICT now?
The big reason for creating the technology group in the DfES was to pull things together. The department increasingly sees its role as one of strategic leadership, setting direction and ensuring that all the many players in the system can deliver that direction and make a difference for children and learners.
There are three major priorities. One is the delivery of current plans, the big ideas in the e-Strategy that we published in March: making a serious difference to teaching and learning; reaching hard to reach learners; forging partnerships with all the people out there that can help; and making the system more efficient.
The second thing is impact. None of us, as yet, can tell a sufficiently powerful story about the difference that the expenditure is making to attainment, to participation, to things that this government cares most about.
The third thing that the technology group can do is to begin to develop a longer term vision. If it hasn’t happened so far, it is not just that people haven’t been listening, it is also that technology people have not necessarily made the case in the right way or understood the concepts, the language, indeed the political imperatives that underpin better services to young people.
Yes, we do have a lot of players, though they all have critical contributions to make. In terms of the e-Strategy, we want to simplify our approach to delivery and reduce the number of actions, with fewer agencies responsible for any one of them. We want to be much clearer about the role of BECTA working with JISC in coordinating the work of all of those agencies. A lot of this is simply taking a big picture view and simplifying it, making it easier for the education system as a whole to come around, to coalesce and get on with it.
How will all this look to the teachers in the classroom?
If we get this right then the teacher in the classroom may have more of a one-stop shop than they have today. And be able to say to Becta: “You be my guide through all of this.” Becta should be more than a sign-post: “For that you should go to QCA, for this to Ofsted, for that it is NCSL.”
I don’t mean to decry for a moment the important role of any of our key organisations. But perhaps Becta needs to be in a position to synthesise it all in one joined-up technology offer. As the department takes up a strategic leadership role and detaches from delivery it is likely to look to Becta to provide a simpler operation on the ground that provides heads and other leaders with a single point of reference for turning around their institutions. That, I think, is the challenge to Becta.
Is there too much autonomy in the system?
We need to strike a balance between “Whitehall knows best and everybody gets the same thing” or the “let 30,000 flowers bloom provision”. We have got to where we are today, and I don’t think it’s bad, by everyone finding their own way forward. However, we probably need to go with a model of regional aggregation, however you define it. It could be a government office region or a small local authority; technology could be procured on a regional basis and then supplied to schools in that area.
My impression is that we will accredit at national level a range of suppliers of managed services across the country. However we do it, it is crucial that every school in a region can exchange data. It needs to be a fully integrated comprehensive system.
We have not mentioned the hardware and software industry as we have talked. How do you see their role?
I think they have a huge role in terms of partnership between policymakers and industry to really achieve our technology goals. What they bring is something that civil servants tend not to have and that is a really deep insight into what customers are saying, in this case teachers and heads and principals, and most of all the learners themselves. Industry has a really nitty gritty understanding of what works for people. It is critical that we bring those insights into government. Secondly it is in industry that we will see the innovation. If we really care about personalised content than I think it will be industry that gets us there: industry that works with government; industry that works with research labs and universities; industry that works with teachers and learners. In the end, we must look to industry and its ability to invest up front with a suitable return down the track. Government cannot develop plans and force them on to industry. It will only succeed if government works with industry to develop ideas. It is important that we have a strong partnership between government and industry.
In five or so years’ time how do you hope it will all look?
I would like to feel that technology adoption, adaption and application is no longer challenging for education professionals; that technology is synonymous with learning and has become the way in which schools, quite naturally, do their day-to-day business.
Second, I would like to feel that we are genuinely on the way to using technology to personalise learning through the successful adoption of learning platforms. That will mean the development of personalised content.
Third, and this is a really important point, we will have to re-engineer the data so that wherever you are in the education system the individual learner can demonstrate to another institution, an employer, or to a parent, what they have done, how they are succeeding and who they are..
If we do these three things: one about culture, one about learning, one about the individual, we will have taken three giant steps towards 21st century education.
