Becta

From Schoolforge-UK

Becta, the British Educational Technology Agency, are charged with the responsibility. in their own words:

"Becta is the Government's key partner in the strategic development and delivery of its information and communications technology (ICT) and e-learning strategy for the schools and the learning and skills sectors."

For more information, see http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/index.cfm

Becta's Chair, Professor David Hargreaves spoke at our FLOSSIE Conference 2004 and has written a booklet published by Demos that extolls the ideas of Open Source development as a model for sharing educational developments. There's a NESTA Futurelab review.

Becta has completed a project to evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Open Source Solutions in schools. This resulted in the April meeting at Coventry, which was attended by several Open Source organisations including Schoolforge-UK. The report is available from Becta's website, and we are tracking reactions to the report here.

At the meeting, Becta expressed their preference to deal with the Open Source community via a single point of contact. To this end, Schoolforge-UK, with the Education Working Group of the Open Source Consortium has formed the Becta Liaison Group.

Also in May 2005, Becta issued an Invitation for Expressions of Interest in preparing Framework Agreements for consultancy services.