Text book learning: Can teachers cope with the IT burden?

Forget borrowed laptops - teachers in the UK now have access to a £230m fund which should make sure they know how to use them, and are proficient enough to pass that knowledge on to their pupils.

The New Opportunities Fund (NOF) was set up this year to offer free training to any teacher who wants it. Since May 1998, all teacher trainees have had to pass a compulsory IT module. The £230m - allocated from National Lottery funds - will be spent on getting teachers who qualified before May 1998 up to this minimum level of expertise.

State schools received files full of NOF free offers just before Easter, and are still wading through it. They can hardly believe their eyes.

Up until now, schools which couldn't afford a decent IT set-up - whether that be hardware or a technology teacher - had to rely on their local education authority (LEA) for extra funds. While LEAs do their best, their IT in education services were fragmented, and often shattered, by government policy in the last years of Conservative rule.

A lucky few schools won European funding which, via a complicated bureaucracy, enabled them to install IT suites worth £100,000 on-site. But there were strings attached: head teachers became responsible for training local unemployed adults in IT, and they risked having their computers removed if specific numbers of job-seekers didn't find work that used their new skills.

By contrast, the NOF is simple, egalitarian, and aims to achieve its target in just three years. Most people admire the ambition, but NOF's critics say that this is unrealistic, and that it will ruin the slow progress already underway in teacher training.

Mike Smith, who represents NAACE (National Association of Advisors for Computers in Education) at government level, said the NOF model is breaking new ground. "They've set up a market with approved trainers, such as Oracle," he told Silicon.com. "It's a soundly conceived programme, although this delivery mechanism has never been tried before."

Commercial software trainers are not always the best option, though. The head teacher of one private secondary school described them as "expensive control freaks".

But in practice, NOF's training will often be delivered by LEAs instead of the approved groups of industry trainers. "I personally know most people involved in these [software training] consortia, and they sub-contract to experts at the local education authorities," Smith explained.

Smith said NOF's biggest obstacle would be "initiative fatigue" in schools. Head teachers have already had to cope with literacy hour and now numeracy hour: "This focus on IT will be an extra burden that may affect the take-up of NOF."

The fund's critics use stronger language. Eve Gillman, acting CEO, Technology Colleges Trust, said: "Many of the schemes for which the NOF money can be used are based on distance learning and online access. It is quite unrealistic to use it for teachers who have neither access to equipment at home or who don't feel comfortable with IT in the first place."

Gillman is a traditionalist in the technology for schools debate. Associations like NAACE and Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) used to support her calls for more basic hardware provision as their first priority. But this year, the political bandwagon has moved onto teacher training - even though hardware targets have yet to be reached.

NOF is the result, and though it may be an admirable project, there is no doubt that it jumps the gun. Schools still don't have the computers they need. But, with plenty of borrowed laptops, the money could take schools that extra step towards the future. But only if industry sponsors don't forget about schools' hardware needs.