cranialdetritus:

jethroq:

iandsharman:

…about this company ripping off schools by saying that they’ll supply them with IT equipment for “free”…then going “bust” and leaving the schools with an enormous amount of debt, far beyond the value of the debt.

Now, none of this would happen if schools were supplied from a central education authority, responsible for procuring and distributing equipment to all schools, able to get big discounts for buying in bulk…rather than leaving individual schools in charge of their own budgets and going to private companies for their resources.

Yes, it sounds like a great idea, giving schools control over their own budgets, but it just leaves them open to this kind of fraud, and it’s clearly been happening on a massive scale.

And even still with companies that aren’t small time frauds, they’re usually big time frauds. Microsoft makes really lucrative deals for cheap software and maybe some computers to go with it. And then impose their own policy on teaching IT, keeping their monopoly strong.

The probalem is taht there aren’t enough people in the field of politics who know their way around technology, and there’s way too many people who know nasty tricks of business in the field of technology.

OP forgot the part where schools are funded through local property taxes. I’m on my lunch hour, so I’ll leave the implications to someone else.

OP is in the UK…where schools are funded in a variety of ways, increasingly by direct grants from central government.