Microsoft Special Report/Daily Telegraph/Partnerships for Schools case study/March-April 2011

Sue Tabbitt

Freedom to innovate

Thanks to a new cloud-based information hub for parent and community groups, applying to run a new free school has just become a lot easier, finds Sue Tabbitt

With just six months to go until the first 'free schools' open in England, the Department of Education has received more than 300 proposals from community groups across the country.
Applicants range from groups of parents and teachers to independent schools, academies and international education providers. The new schools are free to employ more innovative teaching models and content, not being bound by the national curriculum.
Drawing up a new-school proposal has been an onerous task, however. Establishing a genuine need, researching local demographics and finding premises has involved trawling the Internet and contacting numerous separate organisations, from individual councils to commercial property agencies.
Yet now, empowered by cloud computing, Partnerships for Schools, the Government's delivery agency for capital investment in schools, has rolled out a new web site providing a one-stop information resource to help streamline the process.
"The Free Schools Kit web site allows interested parties to explore a given geographical area, to understand more about the existing educational landscape," explains Tim Byles, PfS's chief executive. "With a shortfall of 300,000 school places expected in the next spending review period, we wanted to make it easier for community groups to get their projects off the ground."
The site combines information on pupil attainment, Free School Meals eligibility, Ofsted ratings and surplus places for every school in England. It also details possible sites, a facility that will soon be expanded to show commercial property options as well as council assets.
The web initiative is an extension of PfS's internal information resources, Byles explains. Extending the facilities to a wider audience was simple - a case of moving content into the public cloud. "We already use a cloud-based IT model internally, as 70% of our staff work remotely and need to be able to transfer data, share ideas and collaborate creatively," he says. This internally hosted 'private cloud' set-up, based on Microsoft's Hyper-V server virtualisation technology, provides flexible, efficient access to the organisation's IT systems to users wherever they are.
Byles notes that the new online tool has been produced at no additional cost to the taxpayer, as it was developed and built entirely in-house (using Microsoft's Silverlight development platform and Bing maps to create an intuitive, visual user experience). The internal IT team already used Microsoft technology, so adapting systems to run on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform was a natural extension.
To have run the site in the traditional way, Partnerships for Schools would have had to commission two servers, shelling out £12,000 just for the hardware, then paying for ongoing bandwidth, according to Karl Hoods, PfS's head of information systems. "Instead, we're just paying £100 a month and have complete scalability," he says. In this sense, the venture is risk-free, in contrast to some other public sector web initiatives that have incurred considerable costs, yet failed to deliver. The web site was up and running very quickly, too.
The main attraction of hosting the web site in the cloud, however, was scalability, Hoods notes. "We have complete elasticity to scale capacity up or down as need dictates, which was important as we had no way of knowing what the demand would be," he explains. This is especially useful given the likely peaks in the run up to the yearly submission deadline, or as parents start applying for school places in earnest. The web site, which launched a month ago, quickly clocked up 7,000 views.
Education consultant Ed Fidoe, who has formed a community group with teachers in London, considers the resource an invaluable tool for potential proposers. His group hopes to have a school up and running by September 2012. "The Free School Kit site is fantastic," he says. "I'm surprised it exists, really. It feels like a bespoke tool just for me. It will make a huge difference to the groundwork free-school proposers have to do."