Schools' IT glitches to set capital back £5m

Edinburgh City Council has already spent an average of 4m a year since 2001 upgrading information and computing technology (ICT) in classrooms.

However, complaints from headteachers about the way the service has been run has prompted the council to fork out an extra 5.25m to fix the problems.

The money has been taken from the schools budget and will be spent over the next three years.

Communications giant BT has been responsible for repairing systems and managing school networks for the past four years.

BT was awarded the contract to run the council’s entire ICT systems, including schools, in 2001 through its company Syntegra.

The firm was given 150 million to spend on the ten-year contract.

Headteachers have complained that computers have been crashing, networks have been too slow and connection is too costly since BT was awarded the contract.

The 5.25m funding has been welcomed by councillors who feel the problems should have been sorted out before now.

When BT took over ICT in 2001, they were supposed to upgrade or replace the 6250 computers in city schools at the time.

When schools bought their own computers, BT refused to be responsible for them, as they were not part of this contract.

However, the company did do some work on these systems - sparking confusion among teachers over which computers BT was responsible for.

In light of the complaints, BT has now pledged to set up a special helpdesk for schools, with a target that 60 per cent of faults will be resolved at the first phone call rather than a site visit.

The schools network will also be upgraded, while BT engineers will visit schools in a bid to identify specific problems.

Council officials have admitted that the decision to award only part of the ICT contract to BT has had a "detrimental" impact on services.

The 150m programme was supposed to put the council at the cutting edge of computer technology.

Education bosses are warning that without significant investment of this kind, technology standards in schools will continue to deteriorate.

Colin Dalrymple, deputy director of education, said:

"We have had regular meetings with BT, and we had gone to them and expressed concerns.

We are determined to work together with BT to make sure that schools are provided with a first-class service."

Councillor Iain Whyte, education executive member and leader of the council’s Tories, said the extra money was long overdue:

"I am pleased that at last the council is getting its act together to put together a proper contract. This should have been done a year ago."

Balerno High is one of the schools which has experienced technical problems since BT took over the contract.

Headteacher Rory MacKenzie said:

"The way that BT managed things and restricted things does pose some problems for us. It does make life a little bit difficult, there is no doubt about that."

George Smuga, headteacher of the Royal High School in Davidson Mains, said:

"It has not all been a disaster; we have now got a much more robust network, we are all using e-mail without too many hitches and have access to the internet."