Before visiting this year’s BETT ‘95 show (British Educational Technology and Training), teachers would be well advised to select the six winning numbers in the National Lottery. With enough of the folding stuff in their back pockets, they’ll discover that they no longer have to day-dream about the much-vaunted “classroom of tomorrow”. All they need to equip it will be available from one or other of the 300 manufacturers who will be occupying every available inch of exhibition space at Olympia from January 11 to 14.

But BETT is more than a marketplace it’s a celebration of a philosophy that has characterised the singularly-British approach to IT in education since its earliest days. The computer has always been treated as simply a useful tool that teachers and more importantly pupils have at their disposal. The guiding principle has been to give pupils the opportunity to experience a wide range of hardware and software in a variety of contexts, and thus enable them to decide for themselves just how useful or not the new technology really is.

But perhaps the classroom of tomorrow is going to be a very different place. Indeed, before putting pen to cheque book, jackpot winners should pay a visit to the Research Machines stand and put SuccessMaker through its paces. It will give them a possible alternative, and for many gloomy intimation of the direction educational computing might take in the future.

SuccessMaker is an integrated learning system (ILS). Developed in the US at enormous cost, it offers on 15 CD-Roms a comprehensive course in numeracy, literacy and basic science. Management software monitors the pupil’s progress, and structures a learning programme to meet individual specific needs. Pupils wearing headphones sit silently at the keyboard for up to half an hour a day, diligently doing what the computer tells them. Research findings available from the National Council for Educational Technology (NCET) suggest that in maths at least pupils on the programme make remarkable progress.

Systems Integrated Research (SIR) will be displaying the package it has put into the ILS pilot Global Maths. Although far less sophisticated than SuccessMaker, it does have the advantage of being cheaper and British. More significantly, the Government, excited by the prospect of using IT to get back to basics (although that’s probably not the phrase they’d choose), has awarded the NCET a Pounds 100,000 grant to develop the Open Integrated Learning System (OILS) scheme set up by SIR and the British Education Suppliers Association (BESA). It aims to encourage other British software houses to create modules that conform to the OILS protocols. Acorn, eager to get on the bandwagon, will be using the show to demonstrate a software package which will allow SIR modules to run on its machines.

Anything that offers pupils a chance to master the 3Rs in a mere 30 minutes a day must be good. The problem is the price. SuccessMaker, for instance, costs a terrifying Pounds 850 per workstation. So teachers who haven’t had the foresight to pick the six lucky numbers will be faced, over the coming years, with a painful and fundamental choice. They can either spend the school’s limited IT allowance on worthy, if uninspiring, ILS, or they can continue to offer children the opportunity to experiment with a disparate range of resources.

Teachers, of course, are well used to having to face difficult choices. In the past, they have torn out their hair trying to decide between the different operating systems. At the annual BETT show, they have traditionally rallied, like Roundheads and Cavaliers, at the stands of either Acorn or RM, while a steadfast minority of Apple diehards have wondered how so many people could be so wrong. However, the launch at last year’s show of the Risc PC and the Power Macintosh suddenly made it possible to get the best of both worlds. Apple and Acorn users could retain their old software, while at the same time sharing all the benefits of having the “industrial standard” and access to the vast catalogue of Windows software. At this year’s BETT, new networking applications promise to take this convergence a degree further.

RM will be demonstrating Open Networking, an extension to NetLM which will allow connectivity with non-PC systems. Coincidentally, Acorn will be unveiling Omniclient, a system software package which allows RiscOS 3.1 machines or later (with at least 2 megabytes of memory) to be incorporated within a PC network. The Acorn will be able not only to stash files away on the server, but also to access the CD-Roms, printers and suchlike on the system.

Since Apple’s Power Macintosh also has PC capability, there is no reason in future once the inevitable teething problems are solved why Apple, Acorn and PCs can’t happily co-exist within the same school. It also means, of course, that teachers will be able to choose from the multiplicity of items on display at BETT.

The incorrigible computer buffs will, as always, make a bee-line for the hardware and engage in their earnest technobabble. But for the record number of first-time visitors anticipated at this year’s show, such behaviour will seem as eccentric as going to the Frankfurt Book Fair to examine the shelving. They will have come to BETT not to discuss mips and megabytes, but in search of software that they can use profitably in their lessons.

They won’t be disappointed. Among the hundreds of new products being launched at the show they will find packages covering everything from the Great War to the facts of life. Some will have been carefully tailored to meet the requirements of the national curriculum; others are simply gargantuan databases of text, sound, pictures and animation, which children can explore for themselves.

Even more interesting are the various programs which allow children to create their own paper-based or multimedia extravaganzas. Ablac, for instance, is making available a compendium of PC authoring and desktop-publishing tools on disc or CD-Rom. Oak Solutions will be launching the latest versions of Genesis, the authoring package used in five of the six winning Acorn entries in last year’s National Council for Educational Technology’s Multimedia competition.

Missing from BETT in a big way, due to the rule that excludes anyone under 18, is the very raw material of education children. It’s a sales opportunity going missing because, as everyone knows, computers shift more quickly when potential buyers see children showing off on them. To redress the balance, BETT ‘95 is running Class Act ‘95, which features pupils at work each day using computers from the three major suppliers to education Acorn, Apple and Research Machines. The promotion, which is deliberately not linked to sales activities, is co-ordinated by Educational Computing and Technology magazine, and themes will include multimedia, science, geography, history and the Internet system of international computer networks. There might have been a time when subject teachers had to make up excuses for dragging computers into their lessons, but now they would be hard-pressed to think of an acceptable reason for not doing so. The same will soon be true of the Internet.

Over the past few months it has inspired almost as many column inches in the popular press as Liz Hurley, so it’s not surprising that BT will be using BETT to present its revamped Campus 2000 service. The BBC will be demonstrating the advantages of its own gateway, the BBC Networking Club. So that RiscOS users don’t feel left out, Acorn will unveil a package which will allow its computers trouble-free access to this predominantly-PC environment.

Microsoft will launch Education Exchange, a package designed specifically to encourage teachers take their pupils joyriding on the information superhighway. As well as giving trouble-free access to the Internet, Microsoft claims that it will make it easy for clusters of schools to exchange data, and for pupils with home computers (and the good sense to have included a modem on their Christmas lists) to keep in electronic touch with school.

This communications software is only one module in a sophisticated networking package which is being pitched squarely at the schools market. School Server has a range of attractive features which include a utility which hunts down unauthorised files, and one which enables teachers to log on to a pupil’s workstation and offer individual “on screen” help. It is just one of the thousands of products on sale at Olympia, which teachers who want to exploit the potential of IT can’t afford to be without and which sadly all too many simply cannot afford to buy. Indeed, for all those who do not even have the funds to repair their battered stock of outdated mach-ines, BETT ‘95, for all the use they can make of it, may as well be staged in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Perhaps when Gillian Shephard comes to open the show on January 11, someone could point this out to her. In the meantime, teachers are urged to think long and hard about what those six lucky numbers might be.

BETT ‘95 is organised by Emap Education and sponsored by Educational Computing Technology magazine and the British Educational Suppliers Association, in association with The Times Educational Supplement