An investigation into decision making within secondary schools on information and communications technology inside the same Northern county of England

In 1997, New Labour introduced a national ICT strategy for schools and went on to spend over £3.54 billion on educational technology. This exploratory study examines whether changes to government funding for educational technology has altered the view of the role of ICT in the thinking of senior leaders. It contrasts views of the role of ICT in the classroom from those in the ‘Edutopian’ school (Chen and Armstrong, 2002) who see it as transformational, innovative and an essential part of preparing children for modern life, with those who adopt a more cautious ‘Dystopian’ narrative as found across the work of a range of academics, such as, Cuban (2001), Selwyn (1999, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2011, 2014) and Facer (2011). This exploratory study draws on a small sample of interviews with key decision makers based in different schools that are all located within a single county in the North of England. The findings suggest that ICT remains one of the top five spending priorities for schools who explain this with the use of the Edutopian globalisation and economic arguments. In the study, a minority of key decision makers for ICT had formal training and this was reflected in the range of processes and procedures they adopted. The movement by government away from a centralised planning approach was welcomed across the sample and the loss of some ring-fenced funds was deemed by the ‘rural schools’ to have improved outcomes and created solutions more attuned to local requirements. Edutopian arguments were used by all participants to explain their planning and vision for the future with some desiring to move to ubiquitous or 1:1 tablet teaching solutions