Learning to fly
Helping our school with remote learning
Earlier this year, like many others, I abruptly found myself teaching at home. Our son’s school had closed in the first wave of Covid, and so, with both parents in full time employment, we had to figure out how to keep an eight years old’s education going as a side project. Our toddler’s nursery shut right after, so we soon had a fast moving little guy adding spice to the mix.
What larks!
Learning in
The school, it swiftly transpired, was not exactly ready for an instantaneous move to digital. They were able to post a few lessons plans, and a lot of external content links, up on the school website. The idea was that we would use this content as we taught our son — an approach that required at least one of us to have both the ability and the time to teach. We were struggling in both these respects. The overwhelming amount of content they provided was also rather, erm… overwhelming.
We tried to put our son down in front of the lessons that seemed more self-facilitating, but it was all very meagre, and everyone became very frustrated. With the usual toddler carnage going on around us, not to mention zoom calls, it was not exactly a tip-top learning experience. Plenty of toys were thrown out of the pram, and that was just me.
At the end of my tether, I emailed our head teacher with our pains. She was quite open in her reply— they didn’t know where to start, weren’t being given any support, and she didn’t think they had the budget anyway. I contacted our local government, and member of parliament too — they pointed me at some websites on remote learning and said that this was all the support schools would get.
So, as this is the kind of thing I do for a living, I offered my help. A couple of other parents came on board too, and we soon had a little tech consultancy gang.
We followed up some more, linked up with the parent teacher association and spent some time with the poor teacher who had been handed the job of sorting this all out. It became clear that the school had no strategy, no plan and, perhaps most critically, no real sense of what remote learning might actually be. Furthermore, the only government help they had was a small budget for disadvantaged kids: important, but not sufficient.
We quickly learned a few things:
- the school thought they needed several year’s worth of IT budgets to ‘do’ remote learning
- … but they didn’t have any requirements, and were not clear what they actually needed to do
- they were sinking budgets into infrastructure without understanding its purpose
- they had a full license for Office 365 (with Teams), and access to Google Classrooms but were (mostly) using neither
- the kids (nearly) all had laptops or tablet access, the teachers did not
In short, they were flying blind, with a few scattergun attempts to ‘do’ remote learning. To make matter worse, they were spending tight budgets on hardware they probably didn’t need. On the plus side, it looked like they did have pretty much all the software and hardware needed to deliver real remote learning. It’s true they needed a little investment to fill a few laptop gaps, but money was not the blocker here.
What the school needed was some direction and a plan. Luckily, it didn’t take us long to put something together.
A digital strategy for our school
First we wrote down a vision for them, something like this:
“We will provide a world class digital learning experience to everyone at our school, helping teachers and pupils alike to achieve their very best”
They loved it; it gave them something to aim for; something to talk about.
Then we broke the problem down, so they could target some major capabilities and be clear on what we required to enable them. We drew this out in a nice diagram:
Then we spent some time understanding what they had already, what they needed to sort out first and, most importantly, what they need to be able to do for the new school year (in September). We boiled it down to a simple plan, below you can see a wip version of it:
If you’ve spent any time doing digital strategy or delivery, you’ll have seen plenty of diagrams and plans like this. The point is, they had not. Why would they? They aren’t likely to have had McKinsey in, and there seems to be very little strategic support from government or other support services.
Frankly, the effort required to get our school moving in the right direction could be measured in hours. What had held them back to date was not budget, it was not a lack of equipment, or software. It was some basic strategic technology thinking, and, ironically, the time we took to educate and explain. The latter wasn’t too hard, as the nice thing about working with teachers is that they are pretty smart people.
Results
The school (mostly) got their requirements and goals clear, selected a solution and followed the plan to implement it. Two months later, after the summer hols, they let the kids back in and the school IT lead was in a much happier place…
“This group has really helped me to help prioritise and action key things for the school … and I really appreciate that you guys helped to navigate through Covid and create a plan for September and moving forwards.”
That first week, my son came back home with a Google Classrooms login and has been doing his homework through it since. He’s been more engaged and we get way more visibility. As of today, he’s been sent home again and the class has dropped straight into remote learning — no fuss and little disruption. Is it perfect? Far from it; but it’s immensely improved and they’re only going to get better at it.
Learning the lessons
Now that I have this bee in my bonnet, I have spent some time talking to teachers, joined edutech conferences and read the UK Government Educational Technology strategy (https://bit.ly/340uycH).
Everything I’ve read and heard supports my view that our school is not alone in its challenges.
The lesson for me? There is gap between the digital ambitions of our governments, and the ability of schools to implement. The frustration is, this is not necessarily such a big gap to bridge, as we found. The problem was that you can’t only address it with money and helpful support websites — someone has to come in and help the school to take-off.
As is so often the case with technology, there is an obsession with the product itself and too much disregard for its deployment. Putting it simply, you really need to guide organisations and train people to use new tech platforms. This is hardly new news, but apparently an omission in many national educational technology strategies.
One of the main reasons this support gap exists is the fragmented nature of schooling, certainly in the UK and in much of the rest of the world too. These kinds of problems are typically solved by expensive consulting firms, who are geared for engagement with other big firms. Not lots of small organisations.
The challenge, as I see it, is: how can we find a way to help schools, and indeed, other public sector organisations, achieve digital take-off? The costs may be low and the benefits considerable.
