Helping Schools to Meet the ICT Funding Challenge

Published: October 25, 2010

Following the spending review Webanywhere has released new pricing packages to help schools beat the cuts and improve their efficiency.
Our pricing options have been created to ensure that the provision of learning technologies to students need not be compromised to meet recalibrated budgets. By choosing one of the bundled suites, schools can make considerable cost savings compared with purchasing individual products.


Additionally, schools can look to make productivity gains by using individual Webanywhere products to change the way that existing services are provided. One example is Payschool, which enables schools to collect electronic payments from parents for school trips, meals and donations – providing longer term cost saving solutions compared with traditional payment methods such as cash and cheques.
Schools are facing tougher decisions than ever before to close funding gaps while maintaining quality of service.
WebAnywhere is 100% committed to developing new web-based technology solutions that allow schools to maximise their ICT investment while improving efficiency.

Counting Down to the Spending Review

Published: October 19, 2010

As school managers will be aware, the Department of Education has been asked to prepare plans for cuts of between 10% and 20%. This would come to between £5.71bn and £11.42bn.
While it is now widely expected that front-line schools budgets (those received from local authorities via the Dedicated Schools grant,or DSG) will be protected from the worst of the cuts, the full impact on school spending will require very careful reading of the detail.


Of particular interest is the impact on ICT investments within schools. The cuts inevitably carry some threats to the modernisation of the teaching and learning profession – some projects have already been scrapped, including education facilitator BECTA.
On the other hand, there may be opportunities for schools to save costs and increase efficiencies – particularly in areas such as cloud computing, open source and even the prospect of local authority collaboration to achieve savings through sharing resources and/or technology expertise.
Whatever the outcome of Wednesday’s announcement, many schools will be looking very hard at the small print before making planning decisions for their next budget year.