A simple matter of…

I’m doing a little research for a meeting with John Denham - Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills. I was aware of the BECTA reports, but I’ve just been doing a little calculation.

Using the numbers from a report published in 2000, there are 18,158 primary schools and 3,550 secondary schools in England. This report says 242 primary schools and 32 secondary schools in Wales.

The BECTA Vista and Office report says that upgrading Vista (there were no numbers for Office) would cost about £5000 for a primary school (£125/machine) and £24,000 for a secondary school (£75/machine) for a total of £175m for England and Wales (one third of this is just licensing costs - and I wonder how often they would need renewing).

Verifying those numbers, (18158+242)*5000 + (3550+32) * 24000 = £178m which is near enough. I should point out that the report has an updated section where is says that although the hardware costs have dropped by about 33%, the deployment costs have risen by 50%.

Now let’s look at the BECTA OSS report. On an admitedly small scale sample (so _large_ error bars possible), they found that an OSS primary school spent £691.92 per PC compared with a non-OSS primary schools TCO of £1228.04 - almost _half_. Similarly for secondary schools the numbers were £787.32 and £1035.70.

So let’s do the numbers:
(18158+242)*(1228.04-691.92) * (5000/125) +
(3550+32)*(1035.70-787.32) (24000/75) = £680m

Therefore, using the number from BECTA studies, we’d save £680m (or be able to invest that much more in our schools) _every_ year. That’s just schools, not nurseries, universities, business, homes, …