David Clancy MA (Oxon)
Managing Director and
Founder
I spent 10 years at the coal face of school transformation as founder and
CEO of Digitalbrain PLC. I left in 2005 initially to encourage the development of an industrial strength open source
learning platform for the UK - see below - and now, through Great Schools For Everyone,
to realise my original vision of how to turn schools into local knowledge
multiplexes or 'educentres'. 10 years ago this vision was before its time but today that time has arrived, not least
because the Building School for the Future and Academy programmes still represent huge, almost untapped opportunities
to provide the public sector with much better value for money, and a new operating model which not only introduces high
quality leadership into the industry but at the same time, an economically self-sustaining model - see below.
In the last decade, I have visited many schools and negotiated
with many local authorities and public bodies helping to give form to and drive the government's change agenda.
In many ways it is amazing how far we have come from the days when digitalbrain had a little stand at BETT
and tried to tell people about our new learning platform called 'Autoportal' which gave everyone and everything
a digitalbrain to upload their pictures and files, publish a web page, invite their friends to join them etc. Digitalbrain
was the first personal blog software anywhere - so far as I know - and the first learning platform at BETT. And now,
at this year's BETT 2007, nearly every conference seminar spoke about the central role of learning platform technology in
transforming the school workplace.
And yet what opportunities for transformation remain.
1)
Teacher's TV
Check
out this video and see if you can spot the
£70m missed opportunity:
http://www.teachers.tv/video/3172 Then attend one of our regional conferences, or give me a call, to find out how your school can help transform
the educational aspirations of a generation.
2) PFI - Private Finance Initiative
The press hate PFI but have to date
missed the point. The main reason why the public sector can obtain much more value out of PFI contracts is
because the current contracts merely replace a public sector monopoly with a private sector monopoly and do
not include the operational risk of the actual service in the contract.
Attend one of our regional conferences
where we will present how to win the next wave of BSF PFIs by providing much better value to the public sector by designing
your new school so that it can generate non-core curriculum revenues by establishing itself as the locomotive of the local
knowledge economy.
Design everything you do from this vision and perspective and you will future proof all your efforts. Design from
a narrower perspective and all your mistakes will soon be as obvious to the world as a white elephant in Westminster.
As the 'Dispatches' programmes on Channel 4 in October 2007 demonstrated,
I believe that everyone can get the learning bug
and that communities can shape themselves around stimulating and quenching that thirst, creating interesting knowledge based
jobs for everyone along the way.
Did you know that Knowledge Services are the UK's biggest export sector? Bigger than Cars, Financial Services and Construction?
In 2006 alone they grew by 180% to £88 billion.
Of course, there's a still long way to go and we are just at the beginning
of the Knowledge Century journey.
Come and join us now by registering for one of our regional conferences and see if your school can be selected in the
first wave of 15 new EDUCENTRES for which Great Schools for Everyone has now raised £300m of funding.
