In his “Secret EdTech Diary”, Al Kingsley rightly points out that education technology needs a proper budgeting and investment plan. Splashing out several thousand on a brand new suite of laptops, computers and so on is not to be sniffed at. But what is the plan for three or four years’ time when the stuff you’ve bought falls into one or both of the following categories?

Category 1: worn out

Unlike the situation with your home equipment or most offices, the technology in schools is typically used by hundreds of different students for many different purposes for many hours a week. Throw in the fact that nobody sees the stuff as their personal property, and so may not look after it as assiduously as they would their own, and it would be a surprise bordering on the miraculous if, after a few years, the equipment wasn’t knackered.

Category 2: No longer fit for purpose

This relates to expectations. If you install a program on the network that will enable someone to create a video from a page or two of text and some photos, a few people will try it out. Once it becomes clear how useful that can be, teachers and students will start to use it more and more. If the network etc you installed was not designed or purchased with that usage in mind (because it hadn’t been invented yet, for instance), it will no longer be fit for purpose.

The need for an investment plan

Ideally, then, a school needs a budget and investment plan of educational technology. So far, so in agreement with Kingsley. But at one point he says:

“Don’t plan without considering whether you can sustain what you introduce.”

— Al Kingsley

Click the cover to see this book on Amazon (Amazon affiliate link).

Well, yes, but quite honestly if I, when I was head of edtech in various places, had taken that advice to its logical conclusion I’d never have bought anything at all. In my experience, few headteachers feel comfortable about a rolling commitment to spending money in a particular area, and even if they do sign up to the idea, circumstances can change.*

Budget idealism — and realism

When the headteacher went berserk at me for wasting money — because I’d put in a purchase order for toner cartridges — I mused that that was probably not the best time to present to him my refurbishment plan which involved buying interactive whiteboards (at a time when for the price of just one of them you could have taken a class of students to New York for a week. Well, perhaps not quite, but you know what I mean.

As a matter of fact, the school was generous in its funding of ICT, but I had been given only a consumables budget, not a capital one. This made planning ahead almost impossible. Instead, I had to make a business case for everything.

Although having to put a business case for large purchases makes sense, it isn’t efficient to have to do so for every large purchase. Much better, in my opinion, to be given a guaranteed income for a guaranteed number of years, even if the amount and the timescale are modest. Although it is harder to argue for such an arrangement , it does make sense even from a wider financial perspective, simply because having no investment budget leads to a bit of a problem when it comes to replacing a whole set of computers etc at the same time.

My ideal arrangement is probably where you have an edtech budget, and an opportunity to bid for, or to be given, extra sums of money if some becomes available. If you work in a the sort of school that is allowed to manage its own financial affairs but not to make a surplus at the end of the financial year, you can help the bursar out by offering to mop up any excess funds. I suggested this half-jokingly – but only half-- to the Principal of a financially independent school I worked for, and he agreed to the arrangement.

That worked out very well. For example, the headteacher of one school came up to me one day and asked me if I would like £9000 that he had to get rid of. That equates to over £19,000 in 2021. There was one caveat: it could only be spent on computer hardware, not software. I told the head that computers without software would be oversized paperweights, but he told me that that was the condition, take it or leave it.

I took it.

I persuaded a company to sell me £9,000’s-worth of computers and printers, with the software bundled in. The money enabled me to create an attractive computer lab in a room that had been, in effect, just a walk-in cupboard containing an ancient 486z network, one 386z stand-alone, and a collection of minicomputers that were relics from the 1950s. Needless to say, the room wasn’t used. It was a waste of space.

A history lesson in the newly-refurbished computer lab. Photo by Terry Freedman

The newly-refurbished computer lab not only became a must-use facility, but also the home of a small computer museum I created with some of the neolithic computers I’ve already mentioned. If I’d have stuck rigidly to the principle of not buying anything without knowing if it could be sustained, what a wasted opportunity that would have been.

The wish list approach

I've always thought it a good idea to draw up a wish list of stuff you'd like to see in the school as far as educational technology hardware and software is concerned.

I think this is an important thing to do for two reasons. One is that I think every good leader has dreams. Maybe your particular vision seems impossible right now, but it's important to dream about it nonetheless. Thinking of what could be has, I think, a subtle aspirational effect, and that rubs off onto others. Another is quite simply that if you suddenly find yourself with a windfall to spend on educational technology, or are asked to bid for some funding with very short notice, it's as well to have a sort of shopping list up your sleeve.

And I should say here that, whilst I like to think of myself as both a practical and pragmatic person, there is absolutely nothing wrong with daydreaming. Indeed, I think it is necessary. Where it all goes wrong is where someone has a dream, and does nothing whatsoever to bring it to reality. Dreaming is necessary, as I said; it is not sufficient.

Without a vision, how could you even start to draw up a wish list? A wish list should not be a ragbag of random items thrown together, but should reflect what you'd like learning and teaching with technology in your school to look like. That's the starting point: not "How many pocket camcorders would I like?", but "How can we help youngsters express themselves without having to speak it or write it?".

I suggest the following 'rules' for drawing up a wish list:

Base it on a vision for learning and teaching, as already mentioned.
Discuss it with colleagues and students. Perhaps your wish list could start as the 'seed funding' for an ideas bank. Why not set up a wiki for this?
Organise it into price bands. The reason for this is that I think it's good to have an instant answer to each of these questions, and all the ones in between: "How would you spend £100 if I gave it you now?"; "How would you spend £5m if I gave it to you now?" Sometimes you may find yourself in a situation in which you have to come up with an answer very quickly (in one case for me it was instantly) in order to acquire the money. Therefore it's a good idea to adopt the Boy Scouts' motto, Be Prepared.
Keep reading magazines, educational news, and blogs. You need to keep abreast of what's 'out there' in order to be able to include it in a wish list. I'll cover this in more detail at a later date. But it's another reason to make sure others may contribute to your wish list, since they may know things that you don't.

Above all, keep your wish list up-to-date. Is a new inkjet printer really the pinnacle of your aspirations?

What? You actually have a budget for edtech spending?

If it's within your gift, I would say there are two things you should do with your budget. They are devolve it, at least partially, and set some aside for projects, in what I call an innovation fund.

Devolving Budgets

It may be that you will have to do this virtually. In other words, you say to your team (if you have one, or to yourself if you don't),

"I'm going to allocate X amount or percentage of this year's money to be spent on ..."

The important thing here is that you don't devolve just the budget, but the decision-making too. If all you're doing is allowing someone to place orders for stuff you have already decided to buy, what's the point? You delegate expertise, and responsibility, not merely tasks.

By way of an example, in one of my roles I delegated the spending on software to the people in my team who were ICT advisors. They were the ones in and out of schools every day, so they had a much better idea of what was needed than I did. The only caveats were that they check with me before going ahead and ordering anything just to make sure that (a) we didn't already have it and (b) the technicians could assure us that it would be compatible with the schools' existing systems and software.

Setting Up An Innovation Fund

I've already written about this in N Is For … New Technology: 5 Reasons You Should Buy It, so I won't repeat all of that here. The key things about an innovation fund are that you set aside a sum of money with which you try things out, and that (crucially) there is no blame attached to what turn out to be poor decisions.

Back in the early days of laptops that could be transformed into tablets, we bought one from an innovation fund I'd set up. This device cost around £1000, and the idea was that we'd try it out and, if it passed muster, recommend it to schools. We did not handle it roughly at all, but within a couple of months the screen had almost detached itself from the keyboard because of the constant turning it round.

From a purely functional point of view, it was a waste of money. However, by trialling the product over an extended period (as opposed to having a loan of one for a week or two), we were able to advise schools not to buy one. Thus, we probably saved many more thousands than we'd spent.

In a school setting, as opposed to the local authority one I've just recounted, you might purchase a laptop or some other device, or set of devices, or one of each of several devices, try them out, and then be in a much better position to advise colleagues or the senior leadership team on which device to adopt en masse.

If you have a team of four people, and you buy five different devices (one each, obviously), then by definition some of that expenditure will turn out to have been 'wasted' from an accounting point of view. But in reality, being in the position of being able to say:

"Device A will be useful for staff and most pupils; device B will be useful for very young children; don't touch device E under any circumstances."

is very valuable indeed.

To make an innovation fund work, you need some way of addressing the following questions, and documenting the answers:

How might this contribute to our aims/strategy? I'm not suggestion embarking on a three month feasibility study -- agility is important too! -- but there should be a prompt to make people (including yourself) think about this.
What are the success criteria? Or, more simply put: how will we know whether or not it has worked in terms of what we're trying to achieve?
Why did it work or not work? What lessons can we learn?

Concluding remarks

Knowing that you have a guaranteed budget to spend on edtech, not just now, not just on consumables, but in the future too, and on equipment and infrastructure, is obviously ideal. But I hope I’ve indicated that even in a less than ideal situation there are still things you can do to improve the edtech in your school.

*Please note: my review of this book is planned to appear in SchoolsWeek in September 2021.