As part of the £6.2billion public sector cuts, the new Lib-Con government have decided to axe Becta, the government quango responsible to IT strategy within the school and college sector.
I am sure powers within Becta will claim that they provided a valuable service to the school and college sector, and indeed some of the work they have done is extremely thorough. They did however seem to be too well aligned to Microsoft schools strategy for my liking, and did not really and truly embrace Open Source or shared services. However in my opinion the main issue with Becta has always been it’s inability to drive it’s initiatives forward, settling to provide advice and guidance.
If we are going to see some true strategical thinking within this sector those organisation providing the advice and making recommendation should be held responsible for the implementation and uptake, and be held responsible for the budget and to drive costs down. Can you imagine how much money could be saved if the sector standardised on service providers, such as cloud based solution offerings for email, VLE, SIS etc ? Go out to tender for a managed hosted Student Information System, that ALL organisation MUST use.
There are far too many toothless tigers operating within the public sector, and providing no real value. I can’t see Becta being the last IT quango to fall, I’m sure JISC and organisations like CfH in the NHS with be asked very difficult questions in the coming months.