A tale of two tech policies

The absence of passion and vision that defines State's attitude to technology in schools contrasts sharply with that in the North, writes John Collins

The contrasting approaches to using technology in education north and south of the Border have been thrown into sharp relief by recent events.

On the back of the groundbreaking Classroom 2000 (C2K) initiative in Northern Ireland, which has created one of the most sophisticated e-learning environments in the world for primary and secondary students, a consortium of technology companies including HP, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft joined education bodies in the North to establish the the European Education and Research Innovation Centre (EERIC) in Belfast.

Backed by an initial investment of £1 million (€1.45 million) from HP, EERIC will showcase the work done as part of the C2K initiative to visiting educationalists and politicians from Europe.

Around the same time in the Republic, the Digital Schools Award started. Backed by the National Centre for Technology in Education, the Computer Education Society of Ireland, the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) and Irish Primary Principals Network, the award aims to highlight primary schools that have achieved excellence in their use of technology in teaching and learning.

Teachers in the North welcomed EERIC as further confirmation of their lead in using information technology, but the reaction to the Digital Schools Award among teachers in the Republic was far from positive. Inidividuals posting to the INTO's Dictat e-mail discussion list, which is subscribed to teachers interested in using technology in the classroom, felt the award would be hijacked by the Department of Education and Science.

Correspondents felt the department would use it to claim credit for the good work being carried out at pioneering schools that have had little or no State support for the purchase or maintenance of technology.

According to Seaghan Moriarty, a former teacher who runs Dictat for the INTO, contributors to Dictat are the 3-4 per cent of teachers actively looking at how technology can improve education. "They are not typical teachers. The remaining 96 per cent hardly ever use technology in the school and are not even aware of this as an issue."

Even Robbie O'Leary, principal of Sacred Heart senior national school in Killinarden, in Tallaght, Dublin, who came up with the idea of the award, suggests that schools who receive Digital Schools status should "highlight that it is despite a lack of funding, policy and leadership" from the State. He hopes the award will get principals, boards of management and parents to start asking probing questions about funding.

Teachers feel angry that, since 2002 and the culmination of the last strategy and funding programme, IT 2000, which pumped more than €50 million worth of technology and services into schools, the department has not even had an IT strategy document. Perhaps illustrating the priority that technology now has in the department, it was not able to respond to queries for this article.

"Barely a hundred miles from where we are sitting today, there are 350,000 pupils and teachers using the most advanced e-learning network in the world," says Martin Murphy, managing director of HP Ireland. "When you come back down here, we don't have a structured approach to arriving at a similar set-up."

According to O'Leary, Irish schools were ahead of most European competitors in the late 1990s but now states like Spain and the Netherlands have overtaken us. "In those countries they know what their budget is going to be for the next five years so they can plan. School principals here can't plan for ICT because they don't know if they will get funding or how much they will raise themselves," he says.

John Carr, general secretary of the INTO, says: "Where schools have developed IT infrastructure, this has in the main been because of primary teachers who have taken the initiative, against all odds, to incorporate IT into the education they provide for their pupils. Other schools have been fortunate to be located close to industries that have provided support."

He adds: "An audit of IT facilities and expertise in primary schools would reveal how little has been provided by the Department of Education and Science."

While HP is one of the technology companies that has supported schools with donations, Murphy does not believe it is a sustainable model.

"You can't build a knowledge economy on the back of cake sales and goodwill. There has to be a structured approach to it."

Robbie O'Leary puts it more starkly. "Some schools in the country have had more support from Tesco than the Government," he says, referring to the Tesco Computers for Schools programme.

In the four years since IT 2000 came to an end, the main funding for schools has been €18 million for networking and €20 million for broadband, but this presents its own challenges according to the teachers. "There's been no money for PCs, software or maintenance in that time," says O'Leary. "So you have broadband coming into an infrastructure that is out of date. It's farcical."

While O'Leary's own school is one of the best equipped primary schools in the State - largely due to his own commitment to implementing it - the contrast in morale of a principal in Northern Ireland is illuminative.

Adeline Dinsmore, principal of Ashfield girls high school in Hollywood, Co Down, is effusive about the impact that C2K has had on teaching and administration at her school. It is two years since they received their allocation of PCs, servers and networking equipment. She believes the key is that it is a managed service with all maintenance and support provided by the C2K project team. "In the past, for teachers, that was a good excuse not to take it up," she says. "But it's so convenient now, the teachers don't have to sort it out."

As part of C2K almost 70,000 PCs have been distributed to 900 primary and 250 post primary schools across Northern Ireland. Students have access to e-learning content online which is hosted centrally in a data centre operated by HP in Belfast. Teachers also have tools to create their own course-related content which can be accessed by students as well as providing online assignments.

Murphy believes the reason C2K has been such a success is that the people driving the project had a vision of how it would make a difference to education in the North. "That's the magic ingredient that's missing here," he says "I don't see any passion, any appetite, any vision to say this is what Ireland could be like in five years if we did a, b, c and d. Now let's go and execute a plan around that. If it is there it's certainly not obvious to me."

Murphy believes investment in technology for schools is not optional and without it foreign direct investment will be under threat. "It will definitely have an economic impact . . . If Ireland Inc is saying the future is up the value chain and with high value employment, we have to invest to actually arrive at that goal."