Open source in education: Winning hearts and minds

...technical skills among school technicians is also a key factor. Paul Jenkins, the managing director of open source consultancy SimpleICT (formerly SchoolLINUX) says that few IT technicians know anything about Linux, so are unlikely to support a migration to such software. "The IT guy doesn't know anything about Linux, so a way to protect himself and his job is to say it's no good," he claims.

Schools don't tend to pay technicians much money, compared to other employers, so are likely to struggle to attract highly-skilled staff. A junior technician at a school is likely to get paid around £18,000, while a senior technician is unlikely to earn much more than £35,000.

Ovum's Barnett points out that historically schools have often hung back on adopting new technologies, so are unlikely to embrace open source until it has become mainstream. "Look at schools and the way they track technology. They were still trying to use BBC Micros when the PC was taking over. They're not necessarily huge leaders when it comes to technology," he says.

Even when schools are aware of the potential cost-savings of moving to open source, fear of the unknown can make them hesitant to take the leap. Open source consultant Spencer says it recently lost a tender to revamp the IT systems in a large comprehensive school, despite the fact that its tender was less than a third the cost of the winning tender.

"£350,000 pounds was the winning tender, we could have done it for £112,000, but they didn't take us. It's fear — fear of the unknown," he says.

It can be difficult to change this perception and educate schools about open source as it is not an environment that you can easily sell into, says Spencer, who spent 20 years working as a teacher before moving into an IT role.

"The big problem with schools is that unlike other sectors it's not possible to do direct sales," says Spencer. "Teachers are immensely busy so you can't physically talk to them and they don't have time to answer email. They don't want to be cold called."

Blame it on Becta
The British Educational Communications and Technology Association (Becta) has recently taken a number of steps that could encourage the use of open source in schools. It published a report last year which concluded that primary schools could cut IT costs by nearly half if they stopped buying, operating and supporting products from software vendors such as Microsoft. It has also launched a review to examine whether schools get good value from licensing deals with Microsoft. The interim report from this review is due in June 2006.

But SimpleICT's Jenkins believes that Becta is not doing enough to promote open source. "Becta doesn't help, even though they've done this Mickey Mouse report on open source," he says.

Jenkins also criticises Becta for being inconsistent in its attitude towards open source. For example, he points out that despite the Becta report, it's educational software database lists only a few applications that can run on Linux. Only 18 applications are listed that run on Linux, compared to over 3000 applications listed that run on various versions of Windows and over 1200 applications that run on Mac OS. Even RISC OS, an operating system that had its hey-day in the early 1990s, offers more than 15 times as many educational applications than Linux, the site claims.

The reason for this skew, is that the Becta site does not list any open source software in its list of educational applications that run on Linux, therefore...

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