Public-Private Partnerships Help Northern Ireland's Education System Enter the Digital Era

January 29, 2008

By Jason Deign, News@Cisco

If teamwork is a valuable skill for schools to impart then the Northern Irish educational system deserves a gold star for being a good pupil.

The education authority in the region has been able to give pupils and teachers access to the latest IT tools for teaching thanks largely to the use of public-private partnerships and memoranda of understanding with companies such as Cisco Systems, Inc.

It currently also has contractual agreements with IT providers including Northgate Information Solutions, HP, Microsoft, Learnpremium and Granada, as well as alliances with organizations such as Intel, BT and the BBC.

Using this collaborative approach, the educational authority has developed an IT infrastructure that supports 350,000 users, including more than 330,000 four-to-eighteen-year-olds, across five administrative regions.

The infrastructure also links schools and educational establishments to the national research and education network SuperJANET, a data center in Belfast and local authority facilities such as libraries.

As far as the authority is concerned, "technology needs to be embedded in all curricular activities," says Jimmy Stewart, a speaker at last year's Cisco®-sponsored Public Services Summit at Nobel Week and director of C2k, the body tasked with delivering the digital strategy.

This embedding should ultimately make the underlying IT invisible, he believes. "At the infrastructure level, we actually want to take technology off the agenda."

C2k, which works for the five education and library boards of Northern Ireland, has been working towards this since 1998, when it first formulated a digital strategy that took account of the needs of teachers, administrators and students.

The first phase of the strategy, which lasted until 2003, was "focused on getting reliable technology into classrooms," says Stewart.

One of the first actions under the strategy, which is backed by a budget of GBP£50 million a year for 10 years, was to buy laptops for teachers, providing connectivity which in turn led to a high take-up of professional development programs funded by the U.K. lottery.

"The next step was to award contracts for infrastructure, to ensure all teachers had access to technology in their classrooms," recalls Stewart. By 2000, up to 200 digital curriculum titles were available for a teacher to choose from at the click of a mouse.

At the same time, C2k extended access to administration and management information systems which had previously only been available to administrators to all staff.

In addition, the infrastructure gives users access to e-mail, collaborative tools and even applications for building online courses.

Commercial learning content, such as Learnpremium, which is supplied by Guardian Newspapers Limited, a U.K. media company, is meta-tagged in accordance with the Northern Ireland curriculum, which is different from that in other parts of the United Kingdom.

This allows it to be disaggregated for use within any part of the education system, which covers 900 primary schools (catering for children of between four and 11), 230 post-primary schools (for 11 to 18 year olds) and 50 special schools (with students aged four to 16).

The infrastructure is available to all schools in Northern Ireland, whether protestant, catholic or mixed (there is no private school sector to speak of in the region) and the learning environment it provides can be accessed securely by students at home.

It is hoped that this widespread availability of learning materials will bring about significant changes in the way teaching is delivered.

Since 2003, Northern Ireland's digital education strategy "is about empowering teachers to change the pedagogy, making the educational experience meet the requirements of individual students and improving collaborative working," Stewart says.

So far, he reports, the availability of IT in the classroom has helped encourage student motivation, bring classes alive, allowed children to be more creative and make learning more fun.

In future, Stewart hopes IT will let education move "from classroom to flexible learning, class to personalized learning, 'teacher' to 'learning adviser', year groups to interest groups, individual activity to collaborative activity, assessment of learning to assessment for learning.

Already more than 100 schools in Northern Ireland are piloting the use of videoconferencing connections to link up with partner schools in the Republic.

"We want to improve the learning opportunities for everyone in the community. Our challenge is to get a flexible and capable workforce and schools need to meet the demands of communities beyond the ages of 16, 17 and 18, with teachers as facilitators."

To achieve this level of educational excellence it is critical to work with the private sector, Stewart insists.

Last year, for example, C2k was able to announce the formation of a European Education and Research Innovation Centre in Belfast thanks to a £100,000 investment from HP and collaboration with Intel, Microsoft and Cisco.

"It is very important to link with the private sector," Stewart says. "We need to actively engage with our partners and the relationship has to be ongoing."

Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.