1 ÷ 2 = 3 – How to get the most out of your Computing budget.

Being a Computing lead is an unusual role in a school. Whilst you are in charge of the curriculum, just like being the PE lead, the role has any threads and tendrils. Supply teacher needs a laptop. Visitor cannot connect to the projector in an assembly. Teacher’s interactive board conks out mid-lesson. All of these will see a child (or maybe a bashful member of SLT) knocking on your door and asking for help. If a device contains a battery and a CPU, it ends up coming under your purview at some point. Which also means you may will need to advise or even budget for buying this equipment too.

Budgeting. The very word can instil fear into the heart of a subject lead. Especially when you are the computing lead and could very well be advising on spending tens of thousands of pounds. But how do you go about writing a computing budget? Where do you start? How do you try and address all the competing needs in your school?

Spend for impact

As odd as it sounds when thinking as a Computing Lead, try not to think about your subject. Even better, try and pretend for a moment the subject does not even exist. With that in mind, which devices do your pupils come in contact with the most every day? A student laptop or is it a tablet. Actually, it is neither: it is the teacher’s computer and the classrooms interactive board.

How many hours of learning time are lost each year at your school due to the teacher’s computer crashing mid-flipchart or PowerPoint? It can be a lot more than you think. Whilst a crash shouldn’t harm a device, it does have an impact on effect to how staff treat the devices (usually with a lot less care and a lot more shaking). There is also the morale factor as teachers work in a constate state of mild terror that the next spinning up of the CPU fan heralds a whole morning’s lessons going awry. When forecasting spend, I plan for £500 per teacher laptop. This affords a mid-spec business machine such as a Dell Vostro or HP ENVY 15 with an i5 processor. This gives enough grunt to run multiple programs at once and run 2 screens with ease. Schools do not pay VAT on their purchases so your money goes further than your average company.

Having decided what to buy, when should you buy it? For full time staff, devices will last between 3 and 5 years depending on wear and tear. For part time staff, 5 years is a good plan. With this time frame in mind, you can plan to spread your spend over multiple years, replacing 33% of devices each year.  This means teachers always have excellent kit, and you also have a supply of used but still excellent equipment.

Making something out of nothing

With all this high quality and (hopefully) mildly used equipment, you will have a good supply to redeploy within school. Which is where your good planning starts to pay off: when TAs need devices you can redeploy the equipment. TAs will put less load on the devices drawing out a few more years use from the devices.

Also plan on putting one or two laptops aside to act as donors to keep your part time teachers’ laptops working. This is where having a good relationship with a reliable IT support company squeezes further value from your equipment.

All of this requires keeping good records of who has which device. I do this via the serial number on the base of the device, keeping track of which devices can be redeployed and which are only good for repair donor devices. To aid in this process, I email staff each term asking them to update me on the state of their equipment. To make this quick and easy, I give a series of statements that staff can copy and paste into their reply.

What about the children?

Having talked staff, how do we plan for student spending? This is where it is easy to put the cart before the horse, buy shiny equipment that ends unused or underutilised. This is where we look to curriculum. Not just the computing curriculum, but all the school’s curriculums. What is tech being used for? If it is like my school, online research or reading longer guided reading texts on-screen to reduce photocopying. For these uses, laptops are a poor choice. Logging on takes time and the costs can be prohibitive. Which is where lower budget, Android tablets are great. Lower spec laptops (which are still worth buying) can be £350 yet Lenovo make a very good Android tablet for £99. When buying tablets, budget for cases, screen protects and cabinets or trolleys to store the devices. This will protect your investment long term and many trolleys can be easily re-wired should you buy new devices in the future. Tablets should last 3-5 years, but at the very low cost per device it is easy to replace one or two that may break as needed. You could buy iPads, but if children are using the screens for online search, do you need to spend significantly more per device for no better utility?

When planning laptop buying for children, good spec is still needed. Not quite teacher spec, but a lower range business style device with an i3 or equivalent processor will be cost effective whilst providing a device that will be long lasting and reliable in use. Which means more learning time for children and less stress for staff. There is also another bonus to buying higher market laptops: if they are by the same manufacturer of your teacher devices, common faults are easier to identify and plan for. With the tablets picking up lots of the work, your more expensive laptops will last much longer. I plan for a 5-7 year life span, although we have a set of laptops in my school older than that which are still working very well.

Set-up that spreadsheet

With all these numbers and ages to track, a spreadsheet with a 5 year spending plan is a good way to organise your plan. With a little Excel knowhow, you can even program in price inflation over the 5-year timespan. And putting all those numbers on a spreadsheet makes them look a lot less scary too!

With the current nature of school budgets, detailed planning allows for spending to be moved into the future if needed. As discussed earlier, keep a track of your spending priorities focusing on impact of spending – which can mean putting off spending on student devices.

Adding it all up

Having talked time and numbers, maybe planning your next computing budget will not be quite the scary proposition. Plan for impact and how to re-deploy and recycle devices to get the best return on your investment. Or to use the old maxim: buy once and buy the best you can.