The benefits of partnership with your local authority and YHGfL fall into a number of areas - broadly speaking:
Connectivity
It is important to note that the YHGfL network and the 'broadband' used in homes and many offices are not the same.
- Retail 'broadband' runs over ordinary copper 'phone lines and usually, despite claims of 'up to 8Mb', actually provides a real capacity of about 2Mb on average for downloading, and much less for uploading, that's why it's called 'ADSL', it's asymmetrical, meaning that you cannot upload at the same bandwidth as you download. A YHGfL connection provides schools with 2, 10 or even 100 mbps in both directions. This is essential if schools are to be able to use interactive, multi-media resources and educational applications such as video conferencing and video streaming - particularly when there are many pupils using the link simultaneously
- Contention is the number of users sharing or competing for access to a broadband connection. The contention on a home or standard business connection is typically 50 users to 1 connection. So with ADSL, your school would be sharing 512kbps with 50 other sites, leaving your pupils with very little to share between them. The capacity of the YHGfL network means that contention is rarely, if ever, an issue.
- The backbone network created by YHGfL was paid for partly by your local authority and partly by the other authorities in the Yorkshire and Humberside region. Had individual schools had to pay for this, it is likely that each school would have had to contribute an average of £10,000 per site. YHGfL and your local authority have paid for this, meaning that you do not have to bear these costs which would be passed on by other commercial providers.
- This network backbone provides resilient Internet connectivity to JANET - the national education backbone. This link is provided by 2 x 1Gbit connections that currently provide far more bandwidth than is required by the region.
- The connectivity which your school has is supported by helpdesks and developers who understand the specific requirements of educational institutions - a school's requirements differ significantly from other business users, especially in terms of the sorts of multimedia applications which schools require every day but which businesses rarely use.
- YHGfL's network also provides a direct and safe link into the National Education Network - a growing and significant source of valued and educationally sound resources, free to use by schools.
Heads and governors need to be confident that the school is procuring a digital connection to the outside world, which is purposely designed to ensure the SAFETY of pupils and staff. The Internet is simultaneously wonderful, full of valuable resources and opportunities and potentially dangerous. Because it is unregulated, the Internet poses many threats, of which pornography and paedophilia are merely two of the more widely recognised. The DCSF, YHGfL and your local authority have been keen to create safe, dedicated, discrete educational networks. These allow access to the wealth of the World Wide Web. They also safeguard schools by controlling access, filtering content, denying time-wasting 'spam' and viruses, and protecting the network by use of robust and expertly-managed firewall systems.
The regulations and laws relating to the supply of Internet connections to schools are complex - all Headteachers and Governors are personally responsible for ensuring the safety of children when in their care, and that includes their use of the Internet. By using the YHGfL network, you can be sure that the extensive compliance requirements - and associated costs - are part of our partnership. This includes the need to deploy forensic software, retain detailed logs, compliance with anti-terrorism legislation and monitoring requirements - all of which take time to implement and management effort to maintain.
In addition, by managing filtering across the region, we are able to ensure that we have access to the latest lists - including dynamic lists - of inappropriate sites, some of which would not be available to individual school.
We also cooperate fully on schools' and local authorities' behalf with any official requests for cooperation with formal RIPA notices - taking away a potentially time-consuming and disruptive activity which would otherwise fall on individual schools.
The region has started a significant set of activities relating to eSafety, and all local authorities are taking steps to ensure that schools are supported in this critical area. This is one aspect of the partnership between your school, your local authority and YHGfL which really does save your school time and money.
Content and resources
Through regional procurement and on the advice of a panel of local authority advisers, YHGfL provides your local authority with FREE access to a wide variety of premium online learning materials. Among these are key national resources such as the British Pathe Archive, Audio Networks and Making the News. If your school were to purchase these, you would pay an average cost of £60, every time you accessed the resources.
As part of the partnership between your local authority and YHGfL, we are now members of the National Digital Resource Bank. This scheme has already started to provide high-quality resources which can be imported into your learning platform for use by your staff and students. Over the next year, the scheme will be delivering thousands of resources at no extra cost to your school - but due to the regulations of the scheme, it is not available to schools not taking advantage of partnership with their local authority.
YHGfL is also able to attract extra funding for activities across the region through its work with Becta - this has already resulted in the start of work on exploring the use of online learning spaces, extra activity in the eSafety area and on encouraging schools to sign up for the Becta Self-review Framework. YHGfL is committed to ensuring that its partner local authorities and the schools that work with their local authority will benefit from this extra activity. Becta has identified the vital role that YHGfL can play and will continue to channel these extra resources through us - benefiting all schools in partnership with their local authority.
The Government is committed to the strategy of supporting schools through regional broadband learning networks such as that created by YHGfL, your LA and its other partners. The 10 Regional Broadband Consortia have worked together to join all ten regional broadband networks together. This important development has created the National Education Network (http://www.nen.gov.uk). This national network provides access to key national resources from other public organisations such as the National Strategies, DfES and BECTA. Its use will grow to include a wide range of other providers and suppliers. You can be confident in knowing that the YHGfL broadband network connects you to the National Education Network.
Dedicated advice and support
After detailed consultation with local authorities in the region,YHGfL has recently set itself a new aim and key objectives:
Our new aim is to become the regional centre for excellence and innovation in eLearning. This is an ambitious aim, but one which will benefit learners throughout the region.
In order to achieve this aim, we have adopted four key objectives:
- Work in partnership with Consortium local authorities to identify, develop, implement and support innovative and effective elearning across our region
- Support and promote the development of innovative and effective elearning resources and services to be shared across the region and, where appropriate, nationally
- Ensure that all Consortium authorities benefit from the Foundation's work
- Develop the organisation and our people in order to better serve the needs of learners in our region
As well as providing a helpdesk to support your local authority helpdesk, we do provide specific support for authorities on an ad hoc basis - particularly on issues where our network and your local authority network connect.
We are also staring work on a range of priorities including eSafety, the use of learning platforms and ePortfolios, developments as a result of the review of KS3 and the primary curriculum, 14-19 developments including the Diplomas and the raising of the leaving age to 18. As we develop our work in these areas, we will be using our website (www.yhgfl.net) and other mechanisms to disseminate our work to all schools and other contexts of learning throughout the region.
Conclusion
YHGfL is a regional organisation which is working closely with your local authority - we cannot work directly with every school, but we are dedicated to adding value to what your local authority does. If you are in partnership with your local authority, you will continue to benefit from the increased resources and services that we offer.
If you'd like to comment or ask questions about this, speak to your local authority in the first instance, as they have an understanding about how we specifically support you and your colleagues. It might also help to look at our website (www.yhgfl.net) which is being developed during February and March 2008 to provide more targeted support.