Backyard

The first round of the DER (Digital Education Revolution) has hit our schools today and is likely to occupy a lot of our attention over the next couple of years. While it is wonderful to see so much money flowing into Education (at last!) there are lots and lots of issues. See Graeme Philipson SMH for a non-schoolie comment.

Our system (Sydney CEO) is opting for the initial round to be used to provide laptops for all the kids in Year 9 (to take home ideally) and is already committed to providing funding to help schools install the infrastructure to put a managed wireless system in place to cater for the increased load.

No doubt I’ll come back to this issue pretty often in the future. Right now I just want to clarify my thinking about just what is required and/or can happen as I am bound to be caught up in a number of discussions soon.

• schools fell into this round of funding if their overall computer/student ratio was less than 1:8 in Year 9-12.
• This first round is expected to lift these school into the 1:2 range so the implication is that they will have to buy machines of some kind.

The issues are all covered in the Q&A on the Govt page .

Some questions:

• staffing to support the presence of the laptops in the school?
• do you have to buy new stuff? can you save money by buying good ex-lease e.g.