Interview with BM

Centre for Research into Teacher Education

Faculty of Education

Open University

United Kingdom

1. AF: Question 1: Has your country ever had, and does it now have a policy framework guiding the use of information technology by students in all curriculum areas?

2. BM: Right, the question of IT and any guidance through policy frameworks in curriculum areas. Well, the key thing here is the new National Curriculum.

3. AF: Do you know about its genesis - I think it is in its 3rd revision.

4. BM: It's now decided, it's finished.

5. AF: Is this it? (shows latest version from web).

6. BM: You can get the latest version from the QCA web-site.

7. AF: Question 2: What is the current form and jurisdiction of this policy?

8. BM: It's mandatory. It's mandatory in two ways. I mean, first of all, the National Curriculum is the National Curriculum, so schools by the 1988 Education Reform Act have to..

9. AF: it covers independent schools as well?

10. BM: No - it only covers maintained schools. They have to get a special exemption if they want to move outside the regulations of the National Curriculum. To my knowledge no school has yet asked for an exemption on any parts of the National Curriculum. But much, much more binding on them is that the national curriculum is then used as the basis for the inspection framework. And we have a draconian inspection framework here at the moment. I don't know how well briefed you are on OFSTED?

11. AF: My sister's school has just moved out of 'special measures'

12. BM: I expect there are celebrations there then.

13. AF: Yes!

14. BM: I mean that has totally changed the environment for teachers in schools than from when you and I were working together. And I mean the jury is still out on whether constraining and regulating is actually .... it's certainly politically looks prettier and more attractive, whether the improvements that are taking place would have taken place anyway, without all that hassle is pertinent.

15. AF: The national curriculum is compressing to a core. Is IT in the core?

16. BM: It's in the core, integrated through the core subjects. And made much more explicit in the Orders now than it was in earlier versions. So no subject teacher can escape ICT.

17. AF: Is ICT covered by national tests as the other core subjects?

18. BM: No as a subject in its own right. But insofar as there are some assessments in the core subjects which would have an ICT element, then it could be covered, although there is no hands-on, to my knowledge, in any of the tests.

19. AF: I just came from a voice recognition conference - they're not sure how the exam boards will react. Question 3. What were the political, policy and administrative forces operating on the process of its gestation?

20. BM: I think you have to move away from national curriculum. I think the push towards more ICT literate teachers and greater use of ICT has not come out of the national curriculum thinking at all. Let me try to think .. how could I characterise it. The government has in general had spurts of enthusiasm for ICT, at least going back to when Kenneth Baker was Minister [Wasn't it the Department of Trade that started putting computers into schools] Yes. That's right. Yes he was there then. That would have been the first tranche. But the Thatcher-Major governments didn't really do much in this area. I mean I think, gosh somebody would immediately come and say that's not the case. Well, I suppose TVEI that clearly had a technological bent to it, but in my view.. there are two forces at work here. On the one hand, you've got a new Labour government which is absolutely committed to modernising the country - the Blair government.

21. Before they were elected they had all sorts of plans for doing that. Heavily influenced by the Clinton-Gore administration in the USA, across all areas of policy. In fact I was watching clips of Clinton in Arkansas, when he was Governor, where he made his national reputation on taking the teachers on, and it was straight out of a script from Blair. Sort of saying, 'well, teachers are doing a great job, that's the good teachers, but we'll root out...' you know what I mean. Then there's Gore with the technology, super-highways initiative, and one thing and another. So that got deeply rooted into Labour policy. And what Labour is absolutely,... it'll be in the history books, and you know, quite where this all comes from is another story. They are very fixed on cutting down the number of targets that government is really trying to influence, but on the ones that it chooses, then it will really go hard on them. So in relation to schools, standards is the main target - everything else has to flow from that. But, they do see ICT as a major sort of plank in that. The government published a green paper on education, back in December of last year, which is a must-buy if you want to look at policy developments. A key highlight of that was the development of ICT in schools. They had a very interesting section in that which I like to think I had a little bit of influence on, because the person who is now playing the major policy role in the Department is called Michael Barber. He used to be a Professor at the London Institute. He is now the head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit, which is now the policy focus of all this work. He's somebody I have worked with a lot. He wrote this particular bit. He said on one side that teachers down the 20th Century have had this dilemma that they had to take account of the needs of individuals but they were always working with big groups.

22. What the technology gives you the opportunity to do is to pedagogically come somewhere ..

23. AF: The NCET report on ILS systems commented that it doesn't go off and help someone else.

24. BM: Yeah, that's it. So pre-election government policy to try to use the sort of Clintonesque approaches to things, that gets into government through the green paper. Then in particular the funding of schools which is now called the STANDARDS fund, and government policy - people criticise it, but given the limitations on what you can do, I don't think it is too bad. Over the next three years, or leading up the end of their first term in office, you significantly enhance the ICT capability of schools. I can't remember how much money is going into it - hundreds of millions of pounds going into equipment, and then you are bring in behind that a policy for training the teachers in the use of it. And you don't let the teachers have the money for the training until you know that the school has got the equipment.

25. AF: How is the training mandated. There's the familiarity with the equipment, and then the ability to deploy it successfully in the classroom situation.

26. BM: The teachers have to demonstrate a certain level of competence in that second field. This is another thing that government is saying, but there is controversy over it. We talked to groups around the country about this program, and we get locked on the horns of this dilemma. Crudely I think what the government is saying is 'come on, there's not that many basic skills in ICT'. In actual fact government has spent an awful lot of money on basic skills in ICT, and the people who have received that training don't appear to using ICT any more than people who didn't receive the training. So what they're saying to teachers is 'come on, go and find a friend' it's not written down anywhere, 'who will show you how to get your CD-ROM going' and so on, ' and what we'll give the money for, once you've got those skills, we'll give you the money to really think about how that then means you can change pedagogic practice and how you can use the new applications and how that then leads through to improvement in kids achievement', because that's the name of the game.

27. And I'm not a techy, I never was a techy. If I get stuck with a bit of software, I have to go and ask someone to help me out on it. My word processing skills are pretty limited. But you know, the combination for me of e-conferencing and the new arrival of the web has been a revelation really. So the way the way the government did it, what they've done is to suggest really, do schools have money which ought to be devoted to thinking about new developments anyway, of which ICT might be one, but we government will put in a big push, in the next three years, beginning this summer. So they get money from the lottery, which the new thing, UKP 230 million, and it is the lottery that is administering this training. It's the New Opportunities Fund. It's not the DfEE, and it's not the Teacher Training Agency, it is the Lottery. Although the Lottery has now sub-contracted it to organisations like the Teacher Training Agency some of the work associated with it. It's certainly one of the biggest in-service training programs the country has ever attempted since the national curriculum I should think. And it is running in Northern Ireland, as well as Scotland as well as Wales as well as England, which is an unusual thing.

28. AF: So that's the provision - what's controlling the demand?

29. BM: Well, the way it works, first of all the government says ' we want to create a marketplace for trainers so that schools can shop around for their training. But we're not going to let any Tom, Dick or Harriet come along, so we'll set out criteria, so if any organisation wants to be accredited to be a trainer, they can put themselves forward to government, and if you get accredited, then schools can buy your services with the money from the lottery.'

30. AF: So a teacher will be told by his/her headteacher to go on course?

31. BM: No, it doesn't work like that. The school bids to get the money, and the school can't get the money unless they have been signed off as having got the equipment, teachers with access to the equipment, all that sort of thing. When they have done that, the school can decide, well, it can either train all its teachers in one go with a provider, or it can spread the training out the next three years, or .. that's up to the school to decide. But of course what organisations like we're doing, because we're a big animal in this particular jungle, is to suggest to schools that this is a good way to do it, because if you want to work effectively within the program that we are offering, then buy in to this model, the OU scheme. There's about 100+ accredited providers around the country, but there are only three or four biggies, in the sense that you know I mean that a few small local authorities that have decided to do their own training, but they are not going to train anyone outside their LEA. So the marketplace, when you say 100+ accredited providers, might sound pretty cut-throat, there might be only four or five serious players. Schools can't become accredited themselves, because you have to be training at least 400 teachers.

32. AF: What's the likelihood of schools not applying for the money?

33. BM: Yeah, this is the commercial worry that we have. Part of our risk analysis. The penny has not yet dropped with schools, and I think it is not an easy one to get across. They can do that if they want to. But if the OFSTED inspection comes round in three years time, and they come a cropper over their ICT, and they haven't done the training because they've not chosen to apply for the money, they are going to look really silly, aren't they? There are schools saying there are too many initiatives going on. But I think that what would be the best for us would be if the same number of schools in each of the months between now and 2002, chose to start on our training program. To give a steady-state, with the flexy program lasting about 8 months per school. I suspect that what is going to happen is not much - well, we've got very good recruitment at the moment - but where the numbers are really going to peak will be autumn of 2000, spring of the following year. I'm not quite sure where it will be, but as everyone says, before the end of this program, then you'll see the numbers really... we're going to have to take up this offer.

34. The government upset the LEAs by saying it's the schools that choose. And not really given a place to the LEAs in this. That's not true in Northern Ireland and Scotland where the equivalent of the LEAs is making the decisions still, because the divisions of government have stayed nearly the same. But the way we're running the program is to bring the LEAs back into the scene because what we're doing is, we're characterising the program as a school-based, because we are strong believers in the collegiality of the school, moving itself forward. And we provide a whole range of self-study materials, audio visual materials, electronic environments that people can work in, and then we contract the LEAs to go in and give the face to face support to ensure that this happens. So it's school-based, self-study, supported by advisers going in, getting all the players on side.

35. AF: I'll make sure I get that Green Paper.

36. BM: Yes. There is also a statement of outcomes for the inspectors of the training, which will be the bible that we will all have to work to. It's the most appalling document I have ever come across. It's muddled, it's got negatives in it as though they are objectives, and so we as trainers have had to interpret it, which we have done in a particular way. It might be useful if I showed you some of the stuff....

37. Here it is. Every teacher gets a bag. And in the bag will be the subject materials that they teach. There's a generic primary pack for primary teachers, and a science pack, history pack, and so on, .. this one is for teachers of information technology. They then get a folder here which has all sorts of ... there will be a CD-ROM. In the CD-ROM is the whole range of exemplars about good quality teaching in the subject using ICT. OK. From the CD-ROM they can click through and get to their own personal web-site. So the first thing... we set it up .. so the first thing the teacher sees is their own personalised web-page waiting for them, which takes them through into a whole conference arena. I can demonstrate that to you.

38. They have then got a whole range of resources here, about developing themselves professionally through using ICT, about developments in the subject using ICT, and so forth. But it is not a course in the sense that you start from A and you go to Z, because one of the requirements on training providers is that they differentiate with the materials so that people who are at different levels of awareness and understanding can develop in different ways. There's a slight contradiction - you may not need this - but when they first started out on this training program they were actually thinking about basic skills. So they came up with the notion of.... differentiation obviously applied ... and then somebody, rightly in my view, said, come on , why waste more money on basic skills, let's focus on teaching and learning, but they held onto the differentiation thing. That's right on one sense, but wrong in another. I mean it's right, you want to have flexible approaches, to the way organise their time. So it is right. On the other hand, if you are discussing a teaching and learning sequence, there's not a question of one person being more advanced than another person, you're all in it together.

39. So it is the usual things as you can imagine that we are covering in the text materials, so in the text materials, there is the sort of web-site that a teacher would have (pointing to pages in example materials), and so there are meant to be - there's the desktop - there's meant to be - this is taking them through in print terms, how to use First Class. A key document for us is what we call the professional development record, and that's this, which every teacher starts with. We have taken the outcomes document that has been produced, that every accredited trainer has to work towards, and we have condensed it into 12 areas of training need, under 4 fairly predictable headings. We say, first of all, what is the 'can do' factor here? After all, there are a lot of teachers who are using ICT very effectively to make resources, so they don't have to go through all that again. Secondly, what do you want to do, that's the next thing. And if you move to the right, there are two things. First of all we give them a vague outline of where in the materials here you would find information that helped you develop yourself in a way in which meant you would have achieved the outcome that's identified there as a need. We then say, we are not setting them Open University type activities or essays or assignments that they have to do. We then for each of those areas, of professional need, we've identified a whole range of what we call professional tasks. Now these are the sorts of things that teachers have to do anyway, in the normal course of their work.

40. AF: Give us an example of a professional task.

41. BM: Well, it might be, revising a scheme of work.

42. AF: Okay.

43. BM: You know, the national curriculum requires every school to now have schemes of work. So, you might say to a science department, well, one of the things that you have got to do is to revise your scheme of work to take account of the new ICT dimension. Once you've done that task, you have thought about the whole question of setting your objectives. So we're not asking you to do things are additional to what you ought to be doing, any case. I think we have another one, which is, I like this one, because I have used it with teachers and it always goes down well with teachers. And that is to create a set of favourites, or bookmarks according to which browser version you are using, which are the top 10 for the department in which they work, and to which everyone would want to be referring regularly, and what are the reasons for which they would want to be referring to them on such a frequent basis.

44. And then at the end of the day, what can they now do? I mean, the challenge for us is, to get something which as far as the teachers are concerned, because we are only talking about eight months of training, maybe in no more than 40 or 50 hours of work, you know, how can you get something which to them feels simple and straightforward..

45. AF: This is good, because if the local adviser from the LEA comes in, they can save look this is the one I am want to do, to revise the grades 7 8 syllabus..

46. BM: Yes, that's it. And so that's the way we use it.

47. AF: That's excellent.

48. BM: There is a hell of a lot of, if we got 100,000 teachers doing this, it is a hell of a lot of work. You can see all the people busying themselves around here today.

49. AF: I see, you are ramping yourself up ready for a peak?

50. BM: Yes, that's it. So that is it, that is a pretty key thing. The resources have all been developmentally tested, the usual OU thing. We are immediately going to make some changes, but I think they are pretty good quality, you know. And certainly the resources on professional development, and the resources where each subject has got a section on teaching in the subject. Teaching in science, or teaching in Art. Some of then, might be worth trying to get your hands on, I mean the one on English, on art, on history to give three examples, are absolutely a masterpiece. As are their CD-ROMs.

51. So the teacher gets that. We also produced for the advisers, a folder.

52. AF: I see so, when that says it is the advisers folder, it is for the local authority adviser.

53. BM: In each school, we have the school organiser, who is organising all the teachers to do things, so we have a school organiser's folder. We give the school for videos which the BBC has produced in our studio. We give the schools a professional library of books on ICT, some for primary, some for secondary. And we are right in the teeth of kicking things off. It is only in the last couple of months that this has come to culmination.

54. AF: Right! So I caught you at an important time.

55. BM: The advantage of the link up with RM is, we have been producing materials and thinking through big national projects, and so on, and they are good at marketing and contacting the schools. So they are selling the thing now.

56. AF: Wow!

57. BM: In the way that the OU would never have the capacity to market anything. It should be interesting to see how it goes.

58. AF: I hope it goes swimmingly for you.

59. BM: Yes!

60. AF: I did not realise that big a program was underway. Do you know one thing? I know when the original national curriculum came out, I was quite struck by a fairly firm commitment to microelectronics. Is that still in there?

61. BM: You'd have to ask somebody else than me.

62. AF: I mean, art and microelectronics, I can't see that happening. But robot pens on canvases?

63. BM: (Quietly) no, no. I don't think so, no. My role in this is more the sort of working through the training models that have been used, working the quality assurance systems, looking at the general pedagogy issues that the advisers have to face. I've not actually been involved in development of the materials myself.

64. AF: It is a tremendously difficult thing. To produce national training materials, which are going to be useful in schools that have got this machine, that machine and so on.

65. BM: Yeah, that's right. The CD-ROMs have to run on all platforms that exist in schools, which has been a restricting factor. But on the other hand, it does mean that they run on all platforms.

66. AF: Well, the Web has perhaps been the one thing, that if it works on one machine, it will work on another. If it is Web based. And certainly a lot of training people have taken that on.

67. BM: Yes.

68. AF: That's brilliant! Okay, let's move to No 4.

69. BM: When was the policy? Well as I have explained to you, there were different policies affecting this. There was the policy which you can see enshrined in the green paper, which is a seminal document, because things are flowing from that. And you have the national curriculum policy,. And then you'll have the national inspection framework. For Ofsted. All three of those are going to be driving things. And when the training has finished, then the Ofsted framework will change.

70. AF: Well, let me put this is a question. We were talking before we started about supporting the existing curriculum, or the potential for going beyond the existing curriculum, and make it possible for students to learn things at a much high-level. Out of those to alternatives, what would you say the current thrust is?

71. BM: Say that again. I'm not sure that I'm with you on that.

72. AF: Well, let's take maths. Now, are we using computers in this case to try and make sure a greater proportion of the students reach the current benchmarks,. Or are we trying to radically transform mathematics, and when we teach it we do so on the assumption that a computer will be there, and if we're doing geometry... .

73. BM: I see what you mean. No, it is the former. There will be a bit of rhetoric around the latter, but there is no doubt at all, everything is geared towards raising standards of achievement. And of course we will be stretching the higher attainers to achieve at levels beyond the national curriculum, and all that sort of stuff, as they might put it.

74. AF: There is no intention of changing the national curriculum through the use of ICT? Is it more a matter of reinforcing and improving our results by current standards?

75. BM: Yes there are couple of us talking about the notion about whether it does it does actually transform the curriculum once you have done that. You know, how you measure attainment changes when you are in an ICT environment. Because kid plus machine is different than kid.

76. AF: Well, you see, my background in special education, we are taking the vegetable in the corner to somebody that can produce a novel that sells. That is a radical transformation. Applying the same logic to a person that doesn't have those same disadvantages, and you could get something quite remarkable.

77. BM: Yes yes. Of course it has been talked about and discussed, but in the politicians terms, that is not what is being envisaged.

78. AF: I'm going to track them down. Apparently there are some studies that focus on that alternative aspect. And the government ministers in Tasmania have asked me to find out what information I can on this trip to take back. Because they are not quite sure what do. It will be quite interesting to see which way they go.

79. BM: Yes. I mean, the stuff that is influencing us is very much inside the UK, very little, I think you'd have to say. But all the stuff that is going on around notions of learning, constructions of knowledge, obviously, people, I'm going to for it is saying Howard Gardner, but Perkins, who works with Gardner, is probably somebody, and he has done some recent work in the American educational research association Journal, Educational Researcher, in which he has got some redefineing of the notions of ability, and things like that, in the context of working with ICT. And that is quite influential.

80. AF: I will have to chase that one up. Thank you. Faucault is a person I keep hearing about.

81. BM: Everybody feels that they are in the academic mainstream if they say Faucault.

82. AF: Let's go on to No 5. The first edition of the national curriculum came out in 1989 didn't it?

83. BM: Yes that's right.

84. AF: And revision in 1995?

85. BM: Yes.

86. AF: And the next one is due in 2000?

87. BM: Yes.

88. AF: Is that actually built in, as a five-year cycle for revision?

89. BM: It is now! It wasn't from the beginning. That's another story, the cockups there were with the introduction of the national curriculum...

90. AF: I'm hoping to track down a person who is involved with the ICT bit, next week.

91. BM: I have written some stuff on some of it, but not on the I. T. bit of it. On the whole thing. People to started off not knowing where they were going, and because Thatcher had this thing that the educational establishment was against her, nobody who knew anything about it was actually involved. And a whole load of odd balls were brought in.

92. AF: As far as I remember it came out in August one year, when all the teachers were holiday.

93. BM: That's right.

94. AF: They came back in September to find out what they would be doing.

95. BM: So, all your questions which are in the singular, almost have to be answered in the plural. It will be an interesting study to see the relationship between the modernisation thing, and at the national curriculum push. As I was going to say to you earlier on, I mean, I think the economic potential of the Web which has only just become a talking point in the last three months, e-commerce, is getting a huge push from Blair and Brown, and so on. They do see Britain as a sort of place where you could, if we haven't got manufacturing industry, and our service industries are not as good as some other places, maybe this is what we do get right. So it is the push to modernisation now, which came in before the notion of the Web as an economic environment, and the national curriculum thing. You'll see all of those different people involved, some of the same people, and it is all swaying along.

96. AF: Well this is one of the real developments. The American situation was potentially complicated by the Federal-state tension. We have the same sort of thing in Australia. These questions are great questions, but each situation is completely individual.

97. BM: I have done something on the implementation, (reading from the prepared questions) "but what was the process by which the policy was implemented". Well, government has taken it upon itself to undertake a lot of the push here. For example BECTa has really been a side player in all this. It has got a new name now, but I can't think of a single, hardly any area, of responsibility that it has been given in policy terms.

98. AF: It is a QUANGO. It went through two changes of name when I was there. It is nice to know that there is an organisation which has a responsibility for handing out advice.

99. BM: The general view was that it was only in the area of special needs that it really had any sort of say.

100. AF: Well! It is nice of you to say so!

101. BM: Well they have had various sorts of conferencing things that they have been trying to get going, but has only been in the special needs area that they have been successful. On the other hand it has been very difficult for people working in the quango area, because government has been very hands-on about this. There is now somebody at DfEE called Ralph Tabberer, who is the civil servant supremo for ICT policies. And there is a big push on now to link up all the different initiatives. So another one would be for example, serving head teachers training, which has a strong ICT element in it. There is a new national leadership college being set up near Nottingham, and spawning from that is a virtual leaders college.

102. AF: That is interesting, in so far as much as what you have got here links very much with a graduate certificate in teaching and learning with ICT, which has been devised through what would be the equivalent of the CN AA scheme here, with a vocational education slant. By the Tasmanian state government. I have connected my scheme of work, with their certificate competences. So this is a certificate devoted towards the use of ICT in the classroom, in the school. They require a person who wants to get the certificate, to get seven out of nine modules, and two of the modules, which could be two of the seven you might choose, of a much leadership modules. And those have been adopted by what we call our Principals' Institute. So once again we have a very similar sort of pattern.

103. BM: When the Open University ran, and runs, the Conferencing Environment for Serving Heads, we set up the site everything. And there is another initiative now for all the heads that have been appointed in the last year, who are all being given a laptop by the government. And they are going to have their own web site. And I was talking to the chap who runs our serving heads web site, and he was groaning because he couldn't... there has been no connection between these two. IAnd this is what brings the back to Ralph Tabberer. There have been all these things floated under the modernisation umbrella, how do they all connect together? Of course some of them don't connect. They could connect, but don't currently.

104. On question 8, I think the jury is out on any judgement on implementation.

105. AF: Well, this is where I was going to ask about whether there was any testing to do with ICT in the national curriculum. So it is very difficult to get a measure of the uptake.

106. BM: Yes, and I am not myself privy to,... there are some people doing studies and that sort of thing, but I am not sure whether it is in relation to the national curriculum sort of thing. In relation to the something of that I am interested in, teachers use of ICT there are very few studies really. This initiative, or other initiatives have not been around long enough for anyone to do evaluations.

107. AF: The national curriculum has been around for 10 years!

108. BM: The national curriculum has been around 10 years, and there may well be studies there are. So you would have to search those out. We have a big evaluation and research program associated with this, which is just getting underway. So watch this space. You know, in three years time we might go to say a bit more.

109. AF: I have to finish this PhD in before then!

110. BM: (Reading from prepared questions) "what were the consequences of the implementation pattern achieved?"Well, I would give the same reply to that, it is too soon to tell. All policies are being revised all the time, I think this issue of trying to join things up is the current concern.

111. AF: I might have to try to speak to Ralph.

112. BM: I think the chances of getting to get to him are very slim. He's a very nice bloke. I think you might get a reply to an e-mail.

113. AF: I had a lot of interaction with Philip Lewis, who might have been Ralph's predecessor.

114. BM: Ralph is in the new post created to deal with this. (Reading from prepared questions) "did teacher professional development issues generally precede or follow curriculum developments?"

115. AF: What you are saying is that PD has followed the national curriculum by about 10 years, the national curriculum which originally had ICT in it.

116. BM: The new curriculum for 2000, the new national curriculum for 2000, has lots, has a much stronger ICT component in all the subjects. So government would argue that it is this version we are doing the training for.

117. AF: It's a bit chicken and egg.

118. BM: Yes.

119. AF: In Australia we have very strong teacher development strategies going on, but we have no national curriculum, we have no guidelines for what the heck the kids are supposed to get out of this. Quite a contrast.

120. BM: The thrust I'm putting to you, is to say that the national curriculum is only one force of change here.

121. AF: And the inspectorate....

122. BM: And inspectorate, the modernisation programme of government, those are two other things you have to look at. So if you're looking at teacher development in relation to ICT, you couldn't just think about it through the national curriculum.

123. AF: In terms of timeline, I. T. in the national curriculum has grown since its initial conception in 1989, and inspectorate became a force to be reckoned with about 1994, by my reckoning.

124. BM: Yes.

125. AF: And this modernisation programme, has really only come out in the last 12 months. So there is that aspect on these things as well. It is only next year when you can say that all three are fully working.

126. BM: New national curriculum, modernisation process underway, inspectorate is still there, and then in the societal context there is the explosion of the e-commerce thing. The fact that I can now book a train ticket on the Web, which I didn't do three months ago.

127. AF: The first time you put your Visa card in...

128. BM: Yes, yes I know! I think you are suddenly going to find that teachers will be suddenly using the machines they've got at home for their kids, to do things for the family, and that is going to have an impact back in the classroom.

129. AF: And also statistically, we have a very good statistical service in Australia, they map the penetration of machines into homes, you are also seeing an explosion of the availability in home.

130. BM: Multiple machines, home networks. 50% of UK teachers have a machine at home.

131. AF: Which, if your statistics are anything like ours, is about 20 percent below the penetration into pupils homes.

132. BM: In that case, I would think that the UK's below Tasmania. You don't have the 20 percent of really poor urban people, in the same way.

133. AF: It is difficult to say. I mean unemployment is about 12 to 13 percent. Not very impressive.

134. BM: You can't compare. (Reading from prepared questions)"are there particular schools documents that you can recommend?" The learning schools program resources, which am sure amongst the 100 national providers we have the best! I am positive about that. You have got the national curriculum. The document which I can give you use the use of ICT in subject teaching, which relates to the new regulations for new teachers.

135. AF: We saw a tender that was put out by the DfEE for an automated system of testing that.

136. BM: So you can keep that one.

137. AF: Thank you.

138. BM: I also saw what might be another useful thing if you haven't got it...

139. AF: No I haven't. Thank you.

140. BM: Let me... if your University wants to, these teaching materials can be bought.... This other stuff is not so ICT oriented, though it has lots of implications for it. It is an article that I have done, in a book that I've done, on learners and pedagogy. Some of the things we talk about there is that experienced teachers get well established pedagogic knowledge, and now we've got ICT, how they going to bring it together. In the challenges that that offers.

141. AF: We have one school in Hobart, where they have gone laptop crazy. I saw a lovely lesson there where the teacher said right, get out your database of all the volcanos in the world, and use your G. I. S. system to superimpose that on a map of the world. What do you notice about the patterns you can see. They are all in lines, Miss! Tectonic plates in one hit!

142. One question: to what extent do notions of students educating themselves through the use of ICTs, to what extent are those incorporated in both the national curriculum, and in your training initiative?

143. BM: There would be quite a bit in the materials for the training initiative. But ICT is an interesting example of a sort of schizophrenia in English educational policy at the moment. Because on the one hand people want to modernise and bring all these new things in, and so on. But they would actually prefer not talk about student autonomy and learner autonomy, because another part of the policy machine is finding that the politics of traditional education are quite attractive with the electorate. They are quite happy to keep the two rhetorics apart, because if you bring them together, then the one appears to contradict the other. So on public pronouncements on what the expectation is, it is much more about giving the kids the tools to learn more effectively, to achieve higher standards, and that sort of thing. Any notion of a more emancipatory model of teaching and learning would not get discuss there. Good question. It is very interesting.

144. AF: I use that as one of the column headings in my framework, because I felt that to ignore it was wrong. With it in, the teachers would encompass it within their teaching practice. It is very interesting that the teachers union in Tasmania has put out a policy statement on how they see computers in schools going. It has the usual rhetoric of the central government must provide enough computers that work well for students to spend at least 20 percent of their time using them.

145. BM: We have got nowhere near that.

146. AF: It is quite interesting that it is coming from a union.

147. BM: Yes, that is quite amazing. In Singapore, where I was just a few weeks ago, they are doing the same sort of thing. They have the same sort of conflict. They like traditional sorts of teaching, but it is officially saying that we want 30 percent of teaching to be on-line by 2002, or something like that.

148. AF: There is an interesting relationship with bandwidth. I was astonished when I went to a school in Eugene last week, I wanted to so themselves things on my own web site. I was stunned to find it came up quicker on their machine than it does in my own office! I asked what kind of bandwidth they had. Two T1 lines. Now a school in England, and certainly in Tasmania, think are doing pretty well if they have an ISDN line, and that is 56 k. A T1 line is 1.4 M.

149. BM: That's where I get lost you see Andrew, I'm not into that sort of thing. I understand the concept...

150. AF: A T1 is 20 times faster than an ISDN line.

151. BM: Well that is going to change everything isn't it; that is another view of mine.

152. AF: Well this is the correlation. Some small towns in America that are entirely wired, found that school attendance droped to 50%. Why? Because, said the parents, there is no need for my kids to go to school, they can learn much my effectively at home. So that is why I say there is a relationship between bandwidth and independent learning.

153. BM: Yes. On the way that you posed that question, an illustration of it would be that the teacher training agency which has been given the responsibility by a lotteries fund to them do a lot of the lead work on this, recently got terribly excited about whiteboards, digital white boards. It came to us with the question "you are getting digital white boards into the training materials, aren't you?" If you going talk to people there now, the only ICT aid that they are interested in at all, is the digital white board.

154. AF: I am seeing to people from the teacher training agency tomorrow and Friday.

155. BM: Who are you seeing?

156. AF: Mike Rumble, and Keith Brumfit.

157. BM: Oh yes. Mike Rumble has the national responsibility for checking the quality of all the training providers. It is meant to be a quality assurance regime. It is merging onto an inspectorial regime. They have been some interesting debates. We know him really well, because we are a big player in the field.

158. AF: I have been instructed to meet him a certain hotel, but he won't be wearing a rose..

159. BM: Yes, he is a good bloke. He is alright.

160. AF: I'm looking forward to it.