The conference started with an interesting opening session with a ‘virtual’ Diana Johnson MP. She commented on the widespread enthusiasm across all developing countries to bring ICT into schools – developing a skilled workforce and stimulating economic growth. She commented that in order to keep pace with innovation we must ourselves innovate. However to get innovation in the classroom we need teachers that are comfortable, confident and competent in their use of ICT – a recurring theme – innovative technology on it’s own won’t make the difference.

Then more about home access – only 15% of a child’s time is in school – we really need to embrace the home access initiative. The Institute of Fiscal Studies reports a two grade improvement at GCSE level for students with home access to ICT.

Martha Lane Fox – the Digital Inclusion Champion then led the next session. Many will remember her lastminute.com days. It’s easy to see why she’d been chosen – her charisma and enthusiasm for the brief shone through. For her the challenges are to create opportunity and hence potential. She started by sizing the problem – over 10m people hadn’t used the Internet and of these 4m are in the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups. Within the 4m, the numbers of long term unemployed (> 38%) and those with young children (>19%) were significant cohorts. For her the economics of her task make sense – over £32m of benefits could be attributed to the individuals and UK plc by enabling this group to have access. Individuals could save over £500 pa through their online transactions. She calculated that over £900m of savings could be accrued across government services by shifting a frighteningly small percentage of interactions with these citizens online (one per month per citizen). She reminded us that this cohort consume over 80% of government (and local authority) services.

She talked about the potential for schools acting as local hubs and cascading skills through their communities and the race Online for 2012 Digital Inclusion target.

Martha said that as funding cuts bite then we must become ever more creative. Having arrived in Blackpool by train she felt that we need the same liberating shift today that the railways originally brought.

I then ducked out to do some preparation of my own. I’d been asked (on the train over from Leeds) to deliver a session on cloud computing as the speaker from Civica had had to withdraw. Thanks to having access to his slides, and some hard work from my colleagues back in Telford, a presentation was brought together for me to deliver to two groups of delegates. I enjoyed it and got some positive feedback – not only for the presentation but also for the work we’re doing with OPENHIVE. A member of the audience did tell me off for talking about software as a service rather than cloud computing – but that I had delivered a presentation relevant to an audience of educationalists.

You can find the presentation here.

Patrick Kirk