Education policy and the rationale for technology development in schools: political drivers - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 35

power and responsibility to local authorities only to take them back again within a few
years. During the 1990s, following a central government policy to devolve funding to
individual schools ('Local Management of Schools'), what had been a well-established
regional and local authority network of expert subject advisers was dismantled and
replaced by generalist school management advisers, but the NOF programme, which
was being developed at the same time, depended on these regional subject experts
being available to deliver the training (Leask 2002). Without a high-quality delivery
mechanism, success could have been predicted as being difficult to achieve.
Second, there were therefore insufficient levels of technology expertise and lead-
ership within the education profession and commercial companies to orchestrate the
strategy. Leaders were struggling to manage the cross-organizational operations inher-
ent in the multi-agency initiative; perhaps a more cohesive or streamlined approach
might have been more beneficial. One lesson was that the open market approach
to developing an infrastructure from commercial companies and selecting technol-
ogy training providers required a level of technology expertise and contractual/fiscal
experience more characteristic of private enterprise than public sector education or,
at least, more experience than most school leaders had in ICT in the late 1990s.
Another outcome was recognizing the disparities of funding, which meant that
some schools were significantly better off, which led to differing levels of technology
provision between schools (DfES 2001, 2002; Ofsted 2001). The result of that was var-
ying provision affecting access for both pupils and teachers. A digital divide between
schools technology resourcing emerged that urgently needed addressing (Leask and
Younie 2001), and at the time of writing, while minimum levels of computer ratios
have been achieved, there still remain major discrepancies between schools.
With training, despite the improvements in teachers' confidence with technol-
ogy that were the positive consequences of the NOF initiative, there were a number
of problems regarding implementation, including: 1) the general lack of technology
expertise within school leadership teams, local authorities and ATPs (Approved Train-
ing Providers) and the consequent absence of joined-up thinking; and (2) the limited
impact on pedagogy and classroom practice. Significantly the quality of training pro-
vision varied between providers, and factors at the local level of the school affected
the outcomes. For example, the levels of access to technology and the extent to which
school leaders supported the training, had a major impact on the effectiveness of the
training for teachers (Leask 2002; Preston 2004).
One serious outcome regarding the lessons learnt concerns the extent to which
each of the factors (funding, technology provision, training, leadership), at each level
(macro, meso, micro) come together to combine and impact at the local level of the
school to affect teachers' use of technology for classroom practice. It meant that the
level of knowledge management that was required (across all stakeholders) was sub-
stantial and significantly underestimated at the time.
Knowledge management in the education profession
The multi-agency approach inevitably fractured the roll-out of the Labour government's
technology strategy. However, this was exacerbated in those cases where technology