 I would like now to welcome Josie Fraser, who, as I said, works for Leicester City Council, is the ICT strategic leader here. She's going to be talking to us today about the city as a learning environment, making change happen in Leicester schools. Without more ado, I'll pass over to Josie. Hi everybody. Thank you for coming to see the session. Thank you and hello to everybody watching live or following on Twitter as well. Thank you very much to ALT for inviting me to come and talk today. I'm going to talk about the school sector. I know a lot of you don't necessarily work in that sector, but it is the most fascinating educational technology sector, obviously, and there's some very interesting things going on there. My title today is Leicester, sorry, the city as the learning environment. I think my arms may not be as long as yours. Leicester, that's where Leicester is for those of you who don't know. When you come and visit, you'll be able to see how close you are. We've got around 290,000 residents. It is about one of the 10th largest cities in the UK, and we're one of the UK's most ethnically diverse regions too. We're very rightly proud of our culture and ethnic diversity in the city, and it's something that we celebrate and something that we see as a characterising feature of our city and as a real strength. At the moment, I'm working on the BSF programme in the city, Building Schools for the Future programme, which has been drawn back by the government, but Leicester remains in place, although we have gone through efficiency savings across the programme. It's around a £340 million programme, and we're building or refurbishing 28 schools sites, and those schools include SEM schools, the Hawthorms Hospital schools, the main students schools, and also the student support centres that are also known in some parts of the country as the pupil referral units. We've built four schools already, and we are going to build quite a few more, because it's 28 in the programme. We've got builders on site currently at the moment, building on site, and at the end of the month we're going to have another two sites up and running. The programme end is around towards 2015, so it's an extremely rapid programme, one of the most rapid building programmes in the country for the sector. My role, I'm ICT strategy lead, and I work within Children's Capital, and my role is to work in partnership with the other strategy team leads, their sports and fitness, arts and culture, learner voice importantly, and I'll be talking a little bit about some of the work that the learner voice team has been up to this year in a minute, sustainability and special education needs. I work within a team of people, and our job is to really make sure that the massive investment we're putting into the city has a massive impact, and that we drive through transformation for the city in terms of education and education delivery. My part in that is obviously to look at how the investment we're making in technology supports that. So my job's split up into three main areas. Really I look at the existing contracts and post occupancy work going on. I look at delivering new contracts and driving through build programmes, and I also look at what it is that we actually do with that technology, because critically for us it's not a buildings programme, it's a transformation programme. So we're working currently within a range of broader contexts. These are some of the ones that are particular to our sector at the moment. Obviously the mainstreaming of mobile and social networking services has had a big impact on young people's experiences of learning and their day to day lives, and has had a big impact on schools and school management. There's simultaneously an e-government agenda going on, looking at moving more and more services online, looking at centralising procurement. It's a big e-safety and cyberbullying agenda going on for our pupils and for our staff members, and that's an obvious consequence of a move towards a more open network culture. And there's the carbon reduction commitment, which is a mandatory scheme for those of you who don't know, to improve energy efficiency and emissions from large organisations. The local authority is obviously one of those, and our school estate makes a significant contribution to our overall energy consumption. So it's a huge concern for us in terms of funding and design. And also one of the other areas is obviously the government's agenda, and I've flagged at the white paper the importance of teaching that came out in November last year. And there's two critical factors really around that. One of the main ones is the centralisation of budgets and localisation of decision making to the school sector, to individual schools, rather than to the wider area. And that's playing a part in how we as a local authority plan and offer our services to, and the ways in which we are able to support schools. OK, so we've talked a little bit today about JISC's digital literacy agenda, and that's something that's very close to my heart. In terms of the broader context that we're currently working in, we have a high percentage of learners and young people, unless they're who are living in comparative poverty. It's a significant amount of our learners who are doing so. And we need to ensure, from my point of view, what we need to be doing in order to make sure that investment that we're making in the schools and in technology is a good one, is we need to ensure that learners are leaving us fit and capable to take advantage of the opportunities that technology affords them now. Because not all of our learners are going to be going on to higher education, some of them will be, some of them will be going on to employment, some of them will be going on to entrepreneurship, some of them will be going on to none of those things. But what we can do is we can ensure that they are able to engage in technology in a way that is supportive of their life chances and their opportunities, and that's a critical agenda for me at the moment. So, in terms of digital literacy, I think the question for me isn't, should we be supporting digital literacies within schools? It's this one, it's how can we ensure that we use technology and education not to further disadvantage already for young people and young people. And we know, as use of technology increases, young people and people who are not engaged with, not confident with, not connected to, not able to afford to connect are further disadvantaged. So, I'm going to talk a little bit now about some research that the learner voice team carried out this year. This was a project that the learning engagement section did as a year-long project. It talked to 400 children from 15 schools and they included the SEM schools and the mainstream schools. It was a qualitative activity-based, year-long research program and the age range was from 11 and up to 18 too because some of our schools do have small-sit form colleges as well. So, and as well as visiting those school sites, we also went out into youth clubs, talked to kids in those contexts out of formal school contexts and we also took advantage of Leicester's community media week as well to talk to young people about what their priorities were and what their other priorities were. So, it split up into two parts. I'm going to talk firstly about what their priorities were in the school environment. Now, this isn't specifically a technical question that was asked for them. It was around the school environment, but I think it's interesting to see how technology fits into that and just to see what young people actually want and what they're saying because I think that's a critical driver for us making change happen. So, I need people to engage at this point. I know you're not a shy audience, typically. So, if anybody gets anything in the top five, they win. I haven't got Pringles. They'll have to win something else. So, what do you think young people's priorities about their school environments are? What do you think they really want? Okay, bullying? Anything else about the physical environment? Bright? Colorful. Anything else? Shared areas. Shared areas, okay. Social and learning. Social and learning, okay. So, flexible spaces, okay. Any advances? Toilets. Toilets. Thank you. I'm very glad somebody said the toilets. Access to computers. Access to computers, okay. So, let's have a look. These are the top few, I think 14 or 16 of these. So, number one, more indoor social space. An indoor social space is the thing that is at a premium in our schools because the build money is based on a pupil per area. So, indoor social space is very, very hard unless you're working at looking at designing whole buildings flexibly and thinking really, not in terms of what it is you can deliver in the build, but actually how you can plan and manage those spaces for young people. Number two, better library spaces. Young people are very, very aware of the importance of the Learning Resource Centre spaces. They value them very highly. They want better learning resource spaces. They want comfy chairs. Time to time again they say, that is what will help me focus. That is what will help me relax. Attractive spaces, better use of colour. So, chap up here, who, yes, Fred. Fred Wiens, the prize, well done. Vegetable gardens. Sustainable buildings design and practice, they're very, very keen on what it is that we can get into their buildings that will reduce energy and will support them in reducing energy consumption. Overly keen. The nicer toilets, number seven. Bigger dining spaces with more food choice. Exable classroom places, spaces and furniture. That was the top ten. Now we're on to the less priority areas. But in some ways the more interesting ones as well. More variety in teaching methods. Time and time again they say, we don't like somebody standing at the front going through a PowerPoint. More student input into everything. They're very keen on the student councils improving the work of the student councils and actually finding different ways to engage, different ways to have a say in how their school is managed and run. More flexible use of technology. So there's lots of complaints about having to go to specific rooms to use technology and only being able to use technology within specific spaces at specific times. Greater choice of variety of subjects. More information about subjects coming back. 15.2, better careers information. They felt that they weren't being given enough information about the choices that they weren't being expected to make. And outdoor shelters and classrooms is obviously really important. So what were their technological priorities? This is just asking them about tech. What do you think their priorities are? Keep them right by phones. That's a good one. Once one, ratio computers. And blocking of all the sites they want to get to. Blocking and filtering. Wifi. Okay, so let's have a look. Number one, faster computers. The computers are too slow in schools. It takes too long to get on to anything, let alone find out whether that site's blocked or not. More creative student centre use of technology. That came up time and time again. Why is the teacher the only one allowed to touch the technology in the classroom? Why aren't I able to use the whiteboard? Why can't I do these things? Less use of technology for its own sake. So why are my teachers using PowerPoint again? Less use. More flexible use and access. And this was a very interesting one. This was within the building, again coming back to the point about fixed spaces to be able to use. So it was about Wi-Fi, but it was also about learner spaces. So they talked about spaces within the city centre and they talked about spaces at their homes. Why can't I get access to Wi-Fi in my home? Laptop borrowing and home use was an extremely popular one. I want to be able to take equipment home with me. I want to be able to work at home and do things. Okay, and this was the last 10. So collaborating and learning from young people in other countries was really a high one on their list. They didn't know why everybody wasn't using Skype. They didn't know why they weren't allowed to talk to learners from different countries. Access to local and national decision makers via social media was a huge one. They all want to talk to the mayor. We've got a newly elected mayor with moral powers in the city and they all want to be able to go on Facebook and talk to him and tell him how to do his job a little bit better. But to a range of that as well, so not just local decision makers, they did want to be able to engage nationally. I think that echoes back to the student voice concerns that they had, that they weren't being heard, that they did have opinions, that they wanted to use technology and tech channels to be able to communicate their opinions. They want young people only access. They want spaces that are not for old people and not for almost old people, but are just for young people and children. And they want teachers who can help and use social media and that includes better e-safety advice. They didn't feel the e-safety advice that they were getting at the moment actually fitted with the practices that they and others were joining in. And they also wanted to say in school filtering and blocking, they didn't actually come out and say, we want to free for all, they actually said, no, we understand why some things would be filtered and blocked, but we don't understand why we're not being asked about it and that we can't have times in the day when we're allowed to use things in a responsible way and they can kick us off if we're not using them in a responsible way. So they had a lot to say. So my job really is to take all of that on board really and to push forward with the programme as a whole and also to make sure that those young people's voices are heard and included in the planning. So where we're heading in terms of the work that I'm doing at the moment, a lot of my focus is on the infrastructure, network and connectivity. That's where I'm putting the most money to making sure that we've got really robust infrastructure in place and that we've got good Wi-Fi, that we've got good servers on site, that we've got good connectivity within those schools. So I'm only working within those schools. We are moving like many other large organisations, many universities, many FE colleges. We are moving more into cloud services and storage solutions because primarily of affordability, but I do think there are huge opportunities there that we can take advantage of as well as risks to be managed around that. We're moving towards learner-owned devices because schools are not going to be able to afford to give every student a device on a one-to-one basis and that raises a whole range of issues around management, around security, around safety, around charging, around capacity of the schools to support that many devices. I'm having lots of arguments with builders about floor boxes at the moment. Builders don't like floor boxes, it turns out. Technology and energy reduction is a huge, huge area for us. How do we drive up the use of technology for education while at the same time get people to switch their computers off when they don't really need to use them and use the system smartly to be able to support the user and community-based activities around reducing energy consumption in schools? The broader context, as I said, there's an increasingly school-centred decision-making and budgets going on. We know historically that that doesn't necessarily bode well to small educational institutions who may then be vulnerable to all kinds of claims about the marvels of technology. I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that I don't think Michael Grove has come out as a passionate advocate of technology for learning in the school sector at the moment. That's hanging over us and the reduction in budgets and the rationalisation around that area is really hanging over us now. OK. Nearly finished. OK, so these are the strategic priority areas that I'm working to. I'm not going to talk to them at the moment, but how I'm working is that I have a framed set of priorities which are here that we work to, that we talk with the schools that we look at, that we set actions and we talk about what measures of success and transformation would look like in those areas and then we move them forward. I've talked a little bit about network learning and communities at Berlin last year. I'm happy to talk to anybody about any of those areas and what it is that we're doing in those areas as well. So I'm coming back, really, to the title because I talked about the city as a learning environment and really I'm focusing on the schools and the school environments. Remember when I started out as an ed tech all those years ago at the beginning of time? It wasn't that long ago, but in internet years it was a long time ago. The people that I made connections with and the friends that I made, there weren't people in my city particularly, there were people from Canada, Australia, there were people all around the world and now I can message people through what I name my Wi-Fi channel. Technology and the use of technology has become mainstream. I think it's very much been driven forward by social networking services, but the opportunity to actually look at localised connections, localised networks is actually there now, it's a reality. It's not just me talking to somebody in Canada and people thinking I'm online too much. We have some brilliant things going on in Leicester, some really interesting tech projects and work going on. There's the Citizen Eye and the Citizen Journalism projects that are going on there. There's the Amplified Leicester projects from DMU that are going on. There's the third university stuff that's going on there. There's a whole bunch of stuff and I think what's really, really important is that we stop focusing on just the schools. Obviously we need to make the schools fantastic, but the schools are only one location. What we need is our young people to be able to learn anywhere in their city and we need for them to understand that it is their city. I really think that technology can support letting young people take ownership of spaces that they currently don't feel that they have ownership of and they don't have any importance and they don't have a voice in. Outside of the work that I'm doing on the project I really want to look at how we as a city connect, how we connect the brilliant project, the brilliant people, the fantastic teachers that we have, the fantastic school leaders and the fantastic learners, how we actually connect them and drive forward. Thank you very much.