Schools need clear management arrangements for planning and implementing the expenditure of ICT funds. The arrangements should be consistent with the policies and advice of the school sector to which the school belongs.
Each school needs to be clear about:
- leadership, governance and accountability within the school and the school’s community
- roles and responsibilities
- activities and their interdependencies
- timeframes.
The school needs to assess its current use and management of ICT. Some school authorities have developed planning frameworks that identify the elements of ICT and provide guidance on the progressive development of a school’s capabilities.
In addition, a draft framework identifying 10 elements of ICT has been developed by the former national ICT in Schools Taskforce in their report Digital education—making change happen. Schools can use the framework to help them assess the extent to which:
- ICT personalises and extends student learning
- the ICT vision and all aspects of implementation are supported by the school leadership
- the school plans for professional learning to improve teacher quality and ICT integration
- ICT supports connected learning beyond the school
- ICT improves student assessment and reporting to inform learning design
- the school develops, measures and monitors student ICT capabilities
- ICT is used to manage student information
- there are systems for providing, accessing and managing digital teaching and learning resources
- ICT supports and improves the school’s business processes
- the ICT infrastructure reliably supports learning, teaching and administrative needs.
Schools should also assess their ICT infrastructure and identify:
- the current ratio of students to computers for Years 9–12
- baseline costs for managing the current infrastructure.
Further information on managing and budgeting ICT infrastructure is included in this guide.
Each school should then develop or review its ICT strategic plan. The plan needs to describe the school’s vision and high-level goals for ICT, and be consistent with the relevant jurisdiction or sector ICT plans.
ICT strategic plans outline:
- the teaching and learning practices to be supported through ICT
- the administrative practices to be supported through ICT
- the ways that ICT supports the use of learning spaces throughout the school
- areas of change in the school in which ICT will have an important enabling role.
The NSSCF aims to ensure that every Year 9–12 student has access to ICT. This objective needs to be incorporated into the school’s ICT strategic plan.
The strategic plan should set out the strategies and implementation details for achieving the goals identified against each element of the relevant ICT planning framework. For each strategy, the ICT strategic plan will usually describe:
- the intended outcomes, including the target level of ICT readiness
- the measures of achievement
- the evaluation processes.
ICT infrastructure planning provides the school with plans for:
- deploying access devices to learning and administrative spaces
- developing the school’s network infrastructure
- implementing application software packages
- providing technical support
- changing key procedures, including security and cyber-safety procedures
- procuring technical products and services
- disposing of redundant components
- changing facilities, furniture and fixtures.
Once the overall ICT vision, goals and strategies are determined, the school should plan its ICT infrastructure in the following areas.
Access devices
Access devices are those items of ICT equipment (including software) that are directly used by students, teachers and school staff. To reflect the decisions about teaching and learning practices set out in the ICT strategic plan, schools need to choose:
- the types and capacity of access devices to be acquired
- the placement and allocation of the devices within learning spaces.
Network infrastructure
The network infrastructure needs to meet the requirements for connecting access devices to tools, services and digital resources, some of which will be outside the school.
Application software
Application software must support teaching, learning or administration. Software includes:
- content management systems
- learning systems
- financial and asset management systems
- staff and student management systems
- assessment and reporting systems.
Support resources
With an enhanced ICT infrastructure, the resources supporting the infrastructure (including people, skills, processes, externally provided services and financial resources) may need to change.
Enhancing the school’s ICT infrastructure will incur:
- one-off capital costs, including costs to acquire new hardware and software
- recurrent costs for the ongoing management of the infrastructure, including technical support costs, software licensing costs and telecommunications costs.
When planning infrastructure enhancements, the school needs to establish the changes that will be required to its current and future ICT infrastructure baseline budget, and confirm that current and future costs can be funded.
If budgeting shows that current or future costs cannot be met, the ICT infrastructure plan will need to be revised.
Implementation may include:
- liaising with the ICT consultants of the school system to which the school belongs
- liaising with relevant school coordinators about professional learning and digital resources
- selecting suppliers of ICT products and services
- designing technical changes to the ICT infrastructure
- designing changes to learning spaces, rooms housing ICT equipment, data cabling, electrical cabling and equipment, and furniture
- acquiring ICT products and services, including access devices, network infrastructure components, application software and technical services
- acquiring products and services for changes to buildings and facilities
- implementing changes to buildings and facilities
- implementing changes to network infrastructure
- deploying and installing new access devices
- installing new application software
- disposing of redundant equipment
- testing the changed infrastructure
- changing technical management processes and procedures
- updating ICT infrastructure documentation
- providing transition support to students, teachers and school staff who are affected by the changes or enhancements to ICT.
Most education authorities provide advice and services to support ICT implementation, and schools should use those resources where they are available.