Who said what to whom? Ed Miliband, the Labour Leader, told his audience in the Hugo Young Memorial Lecture delivered earlier this week, that parents should have all year round access to information on their children’s progress at school.
What does it mean? Aside from the broader implications of “people powered public services”, which is how the press has interpreted Miliband’s speech, this is exactly the juicy sort of commitment that we like. The model for Miliband’s scheme is Shireland Collegiate Academy’s pioneering Learning Portal. The school serves a disadvantaged community and is ranked as Outstanding by Ofsted. The Portal allows students and their families to log on and access information on punctuality, test results, sanctions and target grades. Which sounds great, but the reality is that the school has to collect all that data, upload it and run a reliable enough server for parents to access whenever they want.
What could go wrong? Developing the technology to implement this system in schools nationwide, will require considerable investment. The other delivery challenge—probably more significant—is for every school to create and upload the data. This requires school leadership adopting it as a priority and teachers accepting the burden. The beauty of Shireland’s scheme is that they initiated it as an innovative way of engaging with parents; a scheme imposed by a new Secretary of State after 2015 in the Department for Education is a different beast altogether.
When will we know? The biggest test of this proposal’s viability will be whether it can be delivered without becoming another big IT project, which are typically delayed in government. We should know how Labour plans to deliver it—centrally or leaving it to individual schools to figure out—pretty soon if they are elected in 2015. Also, if Labour plans to bring in significant curriculum or assessment reform, then this is unlikely to be a top priority. If Labour’s spending review includes an end to the ring fence for education spending, then delivering any cuts will be the single most important challenge.
Commitment rating: 2 Public service reform commitments will be hard to deliver. The challenge of spending cuts alone is enormous. But this is a striking idea playing on the potential of new technology and, if left to schools to figure out, many of them may adopt it. By contrast, turning it into a major government IT project will be the surest way to ensure that it isn’t delivered.
What does it mean? Aside from the broader implications of “people powered public services”, which is how the press has interpreted Miliband’s speech, this is exactly the juicy sort of commitment that we like. The model for Miliband’s scheme is Shireland Collegiate Academy’s pioneering Learning Portal. The school serves a disadvantaged community and is ranked as Outstanding by Ofsted. The Portal allows students and their families to log on and access information on punctuality, test results, sanctions and target grades. Which sounds great, but the reality is that the school has to collect all that data, upload it and run a reliable enough server for parents to access whenever they want.
What could go wrong? Developing the technology to implement this system in schools nationwide, will require considerable investment. The other delivery challenge—probably more significant—is for every school to create and upload the data. This requires school leadership adopting it as a priority and teachers accepting the burden. The beauty of Shireland’s scheme is that they initiated it as an innovative way of engaging with parents; a scheme imposed by a new Secretary of State after 2015 in the Department for Education is a different beast altogether.
When will we know? The biggest test of this proposal’s viability will be whether it can be delivered without becoming another big IT project, which are typically delayed in government. We should know how Labour plans to deliver it—centrally or leaving it to individual schools to figure out—pretty soon if they are elected in 2015. Also, if Labour plans to bring in significant curriculum or assessment reform, then this is unlikely to be a top priority. If Labour’s spending review includes an end to the ring fence for education spending, then delivering any cuts will be the single most important challenge.
Commitment rating: 2 Public service reform commitments will be hard to deliver. The challenge of spending cuts alone is enormous. But this is a striking idea playing on the potential of new technology and, if left to schools to figure out, many of them may adopt it. By contrast, turning it into a major government IT project will be the surest way to ensure that it isn’t delivered.
