English primary schools will get an extra Pounds 2 million pounds worth of multimedia CD-Rom computers in addition to the Pounds 3 milllion worth announced at the BETT ‘95 technology show in January. “By the time this year’s exercise is finished, we expect to see around 5,000 primary schools (25 per cent) equipped with this technology,” said education minister, Eric Forth, when he made the announcement at the annual conference of NAACE, the national association for inspectors, advisers and consultants for information technology in the curriculum.

It is understood that the Pounds 5 million total will be enough for about 2,400 CD-Rom computers - Acorn, Apple or IBM and compatible - and Mr Forth said that some of the technology should be earmarked for special needs education.

Mr Forth also pledged to work closely with NAACE and other partners, like the National Council for Educational Technology (NCET) and the commercial sector, to create an overall strategy for IT in education: “We all share that goal. ” NAACE is about to publish its National Objectives for IT in Education - which Mr Forth has seen and welcomed - and has announced a partnership with the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), to investigate evidence of IT’s advantages for schools through local research projects.

Mr Forth said that schools themselves were now the biggest purchasers of classroom computers, and acknowledged the concern that current grants for education support and training (GEST) did not have a portion earmarked for IT. “We shall be watching closely how the GEST arrangments work,” he added.

Mr Forth asked NAACE members for advice in three areas: the support services needed for the future by primary, secondary and special schools; which services could be delivered to schools through the media or networks, and which through local and specialist centres; how to keep those delivering support to schools well informed and up-to-date.

His speech was the second major call for consultation on educational IT in as many months, following Gillian Shephard’s initiative for an “education superhighway”. It is seen as an endorsement of local education authority support and a desire to define the roles of local and national bodies such as the NCET.

He revealed that initial reports from the Department for Education’s yet-to-be-published 1994 survey on IT in schools indicated that the majority of schools still look to their local IT service for advice on educational use of IT, but less so for technical support. Ninety per cent of schools wanted further advice on the national curriculum’s requirement of “IT capability” and how to assess it.

Describing Mr Forth’s speech as “a very positive contribution to the debate on how this country’s lead in the classroom use of IT can be maintained or, preferably, extended,” NAACE’s new chairman, Peter Nicholl said, “It was about the mechanisms by which teachers - all 472,000 of them - get to know what is good and, much more important, how the best of educational IT is incorporated into their classroom practice. This is, of course, a moving target which we will never hit, so the question is what permanent structures should exist to provide advice and support.”

Mr Nicholl, IT team leader for Norfolk, agreed with the findings of the DFE survey, but warned that NAACE’s own survey exposed an alarming fall in local advice. “IT advisory teacher support has fallen by about 15 per cent since 1993 and is currently about one third of its 1988 level. I don’t believe that this is purely the operation of the market but rather reflects dwindling central funding for local support for IT, schools with insufficient funds to purchase both equipment and training, and perhaps even the ever-reducing cost of hardware which makes labour- and skill-intensive Inset seem expensive.”

Welcoming Mr Forth’s commitment to consultation, he added, “We look forward to a closer partnership of national and local agents.”

Although the DFE hopes the current initiative, on top of last year’s Pounds 4.5 investment, will reach 25 per cent of English primary schools, the actual penetration is likely to be far greater, as local authorities are also making their own purchases.

England is still lagging behind Scotland and Ireland, however. A spokesman for the Scottish Council for Educational Technology estimated that most secondaries and 75 per cent of primaries in Scotland already have CD-Rom. In Ireland too it is understood that most schools have CD-Rom. But in Wales, an adviser described the situation as “extremely patchy”.

The importance which the DFE is now attaching to IT consultation is a recognition that support cannot be delivered from the centre, and that the “new literacy”, which now takes in media skills and information technology, has implications for economic prosperity. But another angle was developed by Professor Peter Cochrane, who heads British Telecom’s advanced applications and technology department.

A “blue sky” thinker with “twice as many doctorates as O levels”, Peter Cochrane said that what worried him about educational IT was that, when he was a child, his home was an educational desert while school was an oasis. With the trend for family CD-Rom multimedia systems he was now worried that children will perceive their home as an oasis and school as a desert. His analysis was not lost on the delegates whose clients, classroom teachers, have to deal with those gaps.

NAACE, co 59 Carlisle Avenue, St Albans, Herts AL3. Internet: naace@taggoram.co.uk NCET, Milburn Hill Road, Science Park, Coventry CV4 7JJ. Telephone: 01203 416994.