It's Official - Teacher Knows Best! Hot on the heels of BECTA being disbanded we hear that Michael Gove has written to top performing schools to offer them the opportunity to opt out of Local Authority Control, giving spending and decision making power back to those who know best what they need - the teachers. OfSTED graded Outstanding schools can now express their interest in becoming an Academy and start the 3 month fast track process to controlling their own destiny. Can this be true? Teachers once again considered the experts on teaching? Writing from the position of a specialist IT company we welcome this stance of trust in our schools capabilities. We have been quietly practicing this theory for years and using a trusted band of teaching professionals to define and develop our product has kept us ahead of the game, affordable and good value for money. Thankfully a good place to be at the moment. Formed at a time when e-mails were considered cutting edge, BECTA were charged with taking the pain out of ICT in Schools. Good in theory, but in practice contracts between large software providers and Local Authorities meant that schools had been under pressure to purchase over-priced, often badly designed systems. Wrestling through mountains of spreadsheets and impenetrable management information systems has been the norm. Printing off list after list and having to manually collate them, because the systems don't talk to each other. With the freedom from local authority and BECTA schools are now able to choose smarter, user-friendly software from start-up educational software companies, which has already been shown to save huge amounts - not just in terms of paying less, but in precious time savings. What teachers want is affordable, good value software that works as they need it to. By practicing what we preach and using a trusted band of teaching professionals to define and develop our product we have enabled them to spend more time doing what they are best at â€" educating our children! We welcome the latest developments and a return to a higher degree of school autonomy but predict that the next challenge will be striking the right balance. We need to protect the new freedom of schools to make the best decisions for themselves, whilst preventing rogue traders from taking advantage of a possible lack of overview. Key to moving forwards is that if we provide our teaching professionals with what they actually need, we enable them to spend more time doing what they actually want to be doing - educating our children! PupilAsset are a rapidly expanding UK based company who provide assessment and reporting software for EYFS - KS3. Pupil Asset is the product of choice for many head teachers, affordable and effective, freeing up the time of teachers to educate our children.
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