Northern Ireland schools ditch £485M Fujitsu deal after less than a year Fujitsu and a UK public authority have ended a £485 million ($613 million) contract the pair announced in the weeks following a national scandal around the Post Office computer system implemented by the Japanese tech services giant. The Education Authority of Northern Ireland (EANI) ended a contract with Fujitsu – set to last …
......you're clearly asking for far too much, and offering far too little.
I'm guessing that Fujitsu only figured that out once they got through the doors.
Presumably either Fujitsu had written their contract tightly enough - or the EA's contract was sufficiently weak or ambiguous - that once Fujitsu pointed out the the EA that they wouldn't actually be getting what they thought they would be getting (without ££££ change orders) they were both only too happy to walk away.
Now they don't have a contractor. Because nobody wants to do it. Maybe that isn't a bad thing.
This may come as a shock to some of you, but UK schools actually operated pre-all this shit without using £485m worth of software, cocked, er, cooked up by some global tech corporation. Teachers took registers, report cards were written, parents were summoned when needed, and it all got done without any excessive expense. Nowadays, as soon as the WiFi fails, all the little rascals have to be sent home as the MI5-level 'safeguarding' isn't working.
Maybe they should try going back to the future, and spend all that cash on educational resources instead. Perhaps just use a simple non-connected, unhackable system with a works package that never needs updating to log everything on a couple of databases and prepare letters for kids to take home for their parents. Because it would cost very little and actually work.
You really don't need to give a corporate behemoth half a billion quid just so you can teach kids.
"You really don't need to give a corporate behemoth half a billion quid just so you can teach kids."
Exactly.
Schools worked pretty well long before computers came along and even after that, long before the ArpaNET/Internet came around.
The trouble is that someone high up in officialdom decided that all that data was useful and it all had to be recorded, and stored and tabulated into some stats that no one ever understood or cared about.
My wife is a primary school teacher.
This is some of the insanity they have to deal with:
Register
Open link to web page, sign in and find class
For each pupil click on the name to open a new page
Now click on the "Attendance" to open a pop-up and select Yes/No
Close multiple windows and repeat.
Now export the completed list from another web page and open in Excel
Print Excel page to a remote printer in the school office so there is a paper copy in the event of an evacuation.
Now discover the printer is not working as the office person come in to ask why the register has not been printed.
Or all the biometric shite that is used to pay for catering in high schools. I had a big run-in with the head of the school my kids went to because I refused to allow the fingerprint to be taken. Then have a perfectly valid ID card with a picture then wen presented to the terminal also shows the same picture on the screen.
Apparently it is all safe because the fingerprint is not stored, it is converted to a digital fingerprint and encrypted. All run by some third party in the the cloud. Absolutely no concept of what I was concerned about.
I can understand the electronic registration as that should then be able to pick up on kids who are not regularly attending (though frankly the teacher should be able to spot that) but it allows others to start asking questions and maybe engage social services who then have hard data to go on. In theory then they could do fire drill roll call from a tablet with LTE where previously they’d have taken the register book with them.
But having a UI that was clearly specified somewhere and implemented by morons who’ve never taken a register or even run by an actual teacher is a total waste of public money.
Whatever system that school is using for registration is clearly not a modern MIS. Registration at every school I've worked at has been as simple as log in, open the MIS, click on the class you wish to register and do the register - clicking submit at the end. No more difficult than ticking lines on a paper - but allows the school to very quickly see who is not in without having to manually check through paperwork.
"spend all that cash on educational resources instead"
Agree entirely with your overall post. That said, IT is an educational resource too - and not just for kids at school. I haven't broken out my old O'Reilly Javascript reference book for quite a few years now ;-)
Burying their heads in the sand in the modern world would do the kids a great disservice to say the least.
We live in an ever-connected world. Technology is ubiquitous. The idea that schools should just scrap it all to go back to the past is a bit archaic, and misplaced.
Decrying safeguarding also proves you know nothing about the topic you're commenting on. Coming up on 20 years in education IT, and we need more safeguarding protection not less. Children are vulnerable.
That said, I agree we don't need a giant corporate behemoth to do the job. Give the funds directly to schools to figure out what they need themselves.
Or, get the education department to hire a team to build and run it themselves. Cheaper than paying consultancies, the knowledge stays in-house, and you're not constrained by stupid contracts, if you need to pivot, you can.
Individual schools don't have the budget or scale to be able to do that kind of thing themselves, so they'd be off to the for-profit sector buying whatever shiny shite some sales-weasel has dangled in front of their faces.
If you've got £500M of public money to spend over, say, 10 years, if you can escape stupid civil service salary bandings (and ditch the stupid public sector pension while you're at it), that could build you a solid, empowered, high-performing team that could deliver 10x more value over that period than any consultancy ever would.
So, your plan is to ditch good pay and a decent retirement for employees to save money? All that does is shift the cost elsewhere.
Northern Ireland has around 1000 state schools. £50,000 a year per schools is more than enough to contract direct with MIS providers. There's no need for the state to be creating their own MIS, there's now a thriving market in the UK.
Honestly, I don't really understand why NI do this so differently to England. Schools in England handle their own MIS contracts just fine.
This post has been deleted by its author
Fujitsu: As already announced and widely reported, we are withdrawing from the market and retrenching staff.
EANI: But we have a contract!
Fujitsu: Further development and support will be by random contractors with no relevant experience.
EANI: We would like to thank Fujitsu for its support and partnership over the past 11 months.
This post has been deleted by its author
Government procurement rules explicitly preclude taking any account of previous experiences and performance. It's understandable, because it avoids contracts going to established suppliers when newcomers might do better, but it also means that cock-up merchants like Crapita and Fujitsu can bounce from expensive disaster to expensive disaster.
According to the 2021 census, ~365000 children under the age of 14 were in Northern Ireland. Another ~110,000 were in the 15-19 age band.
https://www.nisra.gov.uk/system/files/statistics/census-2021-population-and-household-estimates-for-northern-ireland-statistical-bulletin-24-may-2022.pdf
Sounds like bringing it in-house would be better and cheaper - with engaged staff and stakeholders.
There are plenty of off-the-shelf existing school management systems out there - just choose one.
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Another Fujitsu mess - Post Office, Primark, NZ rostering, NHS NPfIT, LIBRA, …
You have it all wrong because you dont understand perspective. From tax payers perspectives yes they are fucked, from Fujitsu perspective they are a success.
Remember its always about perspective, nothing more or less... and the answer is always who benefits.
Given how fucked up Fujitsu are in so many ways, its a disgrace they can get a job anywhere and yet they get contracts worth millions all the time.
My understanding is that Bromcom's MIS is being deployed across NI schools - but that would be a fraction of the 485 million over how many years.
I'm fairly familiar with the software they'll use at the EANI side to aggregate school data.
Where is the rest of the money going? Consultancy? Equipment?
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