Open Services: Sustainable ICT for UK Schools

Today sees the publication a report from NWLG CEO Gary Clawson on the savings that would follow from a move to open source, open services and open content in schools and across local authorities. Gary argues that a switch to open source and open content would offer 25% savings on IT spend with relative ease, with a further 30-35% if LAs looked seriously at re-modelling how ICT is implemented and supported. Across a local authority with some 20 secondaries and 120 primaries, this would amount to over £1.4M pa.

Oh yes, and you get more flexible, sustainable IT and systems which support generic transferable skills in the classroom.

Gary outlines the first steps for schools and LAs:

Do an immediate review of ALL of your current licence costs and look at the alternative Open Source products. Pay particular interest in your Learning Platform and Digital Resources and cost up an alternative Moodle/National Digital Resource Bank implementation. This is incredibly easy to physically implement. Examine what you spend on Microsoft Office, you do not need it on the curriculum desktop, most of your students use Open Office at home. Do a software build for an edubuntu/Openeducation disc and try it at teacher and student level. If it works well, start the process of replacing every curriculum desktop with it. Brand it and distribute to all of your students for home use. Check performance of new desktop and re-assess any hardware replacement and refresh cycles you may have. 

The report is online at http://www.nwlg.org/downloads/docs/papers/openservices.pdf