Posts tagged "Guardian Professional"

Cabinet Office issues social media guidance for civil servants

Guidance on use of social media for civil servants published as part of the government’s ICT strategy

Have a clear idea of your objectives in using social media, learn the rules of each social media space before engaging, and don’t open a channel of communication you can’t maintain. These are some of the top tips outlined in the government’s newly released social media guidance for civil servants.

Authored by the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Home Office, the guidelines come just over a year after the Cabinet Office first pledged in its ICT strategy to produce “practical guidelines on departmental access to the internet and social media channels”.

Talking about the six principles that make up the guidance, Emer Coleman, deputy director of digital engagement at the GDS and one of the authors of the advice, says in a blog post on the service’s website that when using social media the government should:

• Communicate with citizens in the places they already are.

• Use social media to consult and engage.

• Use social media to be more transparent and accountable.

• Be part of the conversation with all the benefits that brings.

• Understand that government cannot do everything alone, or in isolation.

• Expect civil servants to adhere to the civil service code (online as well as offline).

In part one of the guidance, the GDS stresses the importance of using social media to add a further level of transparency and accountability to the public.

“It allows citizens to input into decisions, to question them and for replies to be broadcast to many instead of one-to-one. So the government can hear direct from those affected by its decisions – the positive and negative – and explain and/or defend its decisions in response to questions or concerns,” says the document.

The guidance adds that using social media doesn’t mean that the government should answer all the queries and questions directed to it through social media channels, and says that common sense should be applied.

Part two of the guidance, authored by the Home Office, offers advice on how departments can overcome technical barriers that are currently hindering government employees from utilising social media.

In a foreward in the guidance, Sir Bob Kerslake, head of the civil service, touches on this point and acknowledges that not all government staff can easily access social media channels at this time at work due to restrictions that may be in place or other infrastructural issues.

He adds: “Keeping abreast of new technology and new ways of communicating in a digital era are crucial to our ability to attract a new generation of talented people into the service.”

The publication of the document signals a recognition within Whitehall that social media has become an increasingly important tool for engagement with citizens and for effectively getting departments’ messages across.

With access to social media restricted in certain spaces within the government, the next task will be to overcome technical barriers and ensure that social media tools are used safely and responsibly by staff – something the NHS has found problematic at times.

Speaking to Guardian Government Computing in March, Coleman said that the time was right for the government to start developing its online personality, but acknowledged that it would take time and that a big cultural change was needed to achieve this.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

Leeds teaching hospitals trust moves to standardised directory

One of UK’s largest NHS trusts shifts to Microsoft Active as part of £37m informatics strategy

Leeds teaching hospitals trust is moving its directory from a Novell platform to Microsoft Active Directory as part of a £37m five-year informatics strategy.

“We want to standardise with other NHS organisations and pull Leeds out the dark ages,” Eileen Jessop, the trust’s deputy director of informatics, told Guardian Government Computing.

Leeds is one of the UK’s largest NHS trusts, but according to Jessop has made very little investment in technology over the years. The issue was addressed in February last year, however, when the trust board committed to the multimillion pound upgrade.

Jessop said that although the move to the new directory is a small part of the overall programme, and valued at only £267,600, it is a significant “building block” for the delivery of better clinical systems.

“I think this is an exciting project,” she said. “If we get this done, we can move far quicker on our whole strategy.”

According to Jessop, the project is currently at “audit stage” and implementation will start within the next few weeks.

“I understand a new directory service can be built within a few months, it’s all the migration from the old directory that can take up to 18 months from start to finish,” she said.

As part of its informatics strategy, Leeds is currently implementing wireless, looking to centralise its storage and introduce “order communications”, so that clinicians can request and receive pathology, radiography and other results, from within the trust or GP practices.

It also intends to introduce a scheduling system to help manage patient appointments, theatre equipment and staff deployment and other hospital processes.

Microsoft Active’s Directory is being implemented by Insight Direct under sub-contract to Yorkshire-based IT services provider Esteem.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

Is ‘profit’ a dirty word in the world of social enterprise?

Directors of three different community interest companies explain that making money is essential to achieving social goals

If you’re reading this, the chances are you understand what a social enterprise is. But what happens if you work within a social enterprise and your customers don’t understand the ethos behind your organisation?

We talked to three community interest companies all facing the challenge of convincing their customers that they are reputable, socially responsible organisations and that profit is necessary to achieve their aims.

There’s an increasing amount of scepticism in the media, and therefore in the public domain, of the growing number of organisations leaping on the social enterprise bandwagon. And, yes, there probably are some who are less than scrupulous and may even be exploiting a social cause for their own profit. However, there are also far more social enterprises that really do give a damn and are passionate about their businesses’ social agenda. The sticky bit comes in when you consider what happens to the profits and communicating the ethics of this to customers.

Those of us who follow the social enterprise agenda immerse ourselves in articles, tweets and blogs; but the reality is that most people out there have limited interest in, or exposure to, social enterprises – let alone their legal structures. On the whole, if people are interested in social benefit then they appear to be clear on the motivation of charitable and volunteering platforms but are more nervous of “new” structures, perhaps confused by the media portrayal and political perceptions of organisations with social purpose.

Jill Cunningham, director of Essential Social Enterprises works with young people and schools to set up businesses in a socially enterprising way. Within the parameters of the relatively new community interest company legal structure, Cunningham has had to work hard at her marketing.

Before she starts any partnership work, Cunningham thoroughly researches her market and focuses on educating her customers on the social enterprise philosophy, to ensure they understand this is not a voluntary organisation – it’s a business. She feels it’s important to clarify who will benefit and how she, as a social enterprise, will measure their progress.

However, Cunningham is clear about the tough reality that, irrespective of social objectives, the social enterprise must be profitable and operate successfully. She has found it useful to gain social enterprise qualifications and networks heavily with other similar structures, both locally and through social media.

Matthew Barraud, director of the Morvagh Sailing Project has gone one step further. With a mission to advance the education and personal development of young people through offshore sailing at Plymouth, he’s seriously considering starting a charity alongside his CIC, to allay some of his potential customers’ suspicions.

Barraud again feels that the public are far more comfortable with the concept of a charity and are wary of the social enterprise model. This is particularly true when trying to negotiate discounts with local funders or suppliers who would prefer him to operate charitably. Parents of the young people participating in the sailing trips are often confused by the CIC concept, as are adult learners taking part in lectures Barraud delivers.

Barraud advises other social enterprises to join supportive local social enterprise forums and networks. He has also enthusiastically launched into the most popular social media networks, which are cheap marketing tools, and necessary for a small business that cannot afford expensive formal marketing and PR.

All this communication activity is crucial. While Barraud considers taking the huge step of initiating a charity to attract business, he is concerned about the many hoops to jump through, the complex governance arrangements and the recruitment and management of a trustee board.

However, Michelle Myers, director of Little Enterprise, is adamant that any social enterprise must not hide from the concept of making profit. She believes it’s essential not to be scared to admit you make money. However, she’s also clear that, within this structure, any profits will be used differently to normal commercial business. Myers feels customers must be made aware of the limitations for distribution of profits that social enterprise structures have, and that they fall within stringent Companies House regulations.

But for Myers, the community interest company structure suits her business – demonstrating that they are “of the community”. She works with young people and schools to set up business in a socially enterprising way, including researching and choosing their own suitable structures. Myers also engages in a significant amount of social media and local networking bodies and connects with many other varied social enterprises. She strongly believes there should be more support for this fast-growing sector.

Finally, Myers advises investigating the newly formed social enterprise “marks’ that are launching. The criteria may, for example, ask for accounts to be submitted and investigate the origin of profits; this introduces a rigour that is useful when communicating with external customers and organisations.

Can we help?

Community interest companies are a relatively small, newly sprouting branch of social enterprise. It seems that, in this instance, size really does matter, as these aspiring entrepreneurs struggle to communicate their admirable intentions to their customers and end users. But will there be enough new CICs to shake the newly evolving market up? Or are the limitations simply too stringent for would-be entrepreneurs who want to change the world and yet also be creative with their resultant monetary efforts? What can we, the public, media and government, do to support these change-makers to create and grow successful businesses that benefit our communities?

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To join the social enterprise network, click here

Creating a genuinely sustainable higher education system

The funding system set up to support the increase in tuition fees in England is financially and socially unsustainable

Last year’s white paper, Putting students at the heart of the system, built on the Browne review, which sought to put higher education on a sustainable footing.

There has been much debate about what we might call social sustainability since tuition fees rose to £9,000. Discussion has focused on higher fees putting off poorer students. Yet, although application rates have decreased, thus far this decrease has not added to social inequality, because applications from poorer school-leavers have held up.

The reforms have introduced a lot of support for poorer students – increased maintenance grants, the national scholarship programme, bursaries and fee waivers from individual universities. But perhaps, most importantly, the message seems to have got through about the generosity of loan repayment terms: that if you go on to be a low earner, you’ll come nowhere near paying back all you’ve borrowed; that repayment does not start until you earn £21,000; that the percentage of salary taken after this threshold is only 9%, meaning a graduate on £30,000 can expect to pay around £68 a month).

This is all well and good, you might think. If we are going to make students pay more towards their education, then we better establish substantial and progressive means of financial support.

So what’s the problem?

In focusing on making repayment terms on loans as generous as possible, the government has lost sight of other very important issues of social and financial sustainability.

The first and central of these is the possibility that somewhere between 30% and 40% of student loans will never be paid back. Previously, the write-off rate for loans was about 26%. The Treasury is concerned by the new higher write-off rate and, as a result, has insisted on the continuation of the cap on overall student numbers first introduced in 2008. It has also overseen a further tightening of the cap over the last two years, with an estimated 25,000 university places taken out of the system.

Enforcing the cap on numbers has the potential to do much more harm to social mobility than increased fees because most of those who would benefit from more places are from poorer backgrounds. The Higher Education Policy Institute estimates that, by 2020, there could be as many as 100,000 applicants per year who are genuinely capable of entering higher education but who are locked out of the system, which is equivalent to more than one quarter of the 360,000 new entrants to higher education who went through Ucas in 2010.

So, although the recent changes to tuition fees look socially sustainable, they are in fact not. Debt might not be putting off poorer students from applying to universities, but many tens of thousands a year are unable to get a place when they apply. In a time of prolonged economic stagnation, where there are far fewer jobs, this denial of access seems particularly harmful.

So what can be done?

The government has two choices within the current spending restrictions. It can accept the status quo and publicly admit that it will never get back a large amount of its loans, defending the loss by saying it is the price of a fair and progressive funding system. Although doing this would store up future bad debt and leave England’s higher education system unable to keep up with increasing demand.

On the other hand, the government could tighten up repayment terms so that it gets more money back. This would mean lowering the threshold for repayment and increasing the “tax” rate on income above that threshold, as well as raising interest rates for higher earners. The money saved from less bad debt could then be reinvested in increasing the number of total student places.

These two options leave us with a very tough choice – between making students slightly worse-off when they start work and locking out tens of thousands of young people from higher education each year. But, on balance, I believe siding with increased access through funding more places is the right thing to do, Moreover, it puts us on track to create a truly sustainable higher education system – both fiscally and socially – not just a progressive repayment system.

This is an excerpt from the Higher Education Careers Services Unit’s spring edition of Graduate Market Trends. The full article can be viewed at hecsu.ac.uk.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network.

No, Minister: why has it taken five years to reform the ICT GCSE?

Dick Vinegar asks who are the guilty parties in the failure to sort out the ICT GCSE, and worries whether its replacement will be up and running on time

Five years ago a group of academics, representing the parliamentary IT committee, visited the schools minister to tell him that the GCSE for ICT was not fit for purpose.

It just taught pupils how to do things with Microsoft Word and Excel, but did not engage with them at any more detailed or creative level. Nor did it prepare pupils for computer science A-levels or university courses.

My grandson, a digital native, who was 13 at the time, decided against doing the ICT GCSE because it was a waste of time. He told me that this was a common view among all his contemporaries. This made me sad, because he was saying farewell to any deep technological knowledge and the careers it opens up.

Two years later, because the Department for Education had done nothing, the group of academics visited the department again. And in 2009, a study by e-skills said that ICT GCSE was “so harmful, boring and/or irrelevant it should simply be scrapped”. It should be replaced by a “computer science” course, which teaches children how to make the computers do new things, and not just how to use Office software.

Already, academics, IT experts and, most importantly, the pupils, had built up a consensus that the ICT GCSE was no good. But still nothing happened.

I have often wondered about the amazing inertia of the British civil service when faced by a major challenge. This was a perfect example. Why did it take five years for anything to happen? Who was to blame for the inertia? Was it vested interests, the usual scapegoat?

Was it luddite opposition from the unions? They had a lot of members who had been teaching this subject for years, and were too far past their sell-by date to learn the new tricks of teaching children how to program, and all the other skills in a proper computer science curriculum. Abandoning the ICT curriculum could trigger massive redundancies among this ageing and inflexible workforce. So, maybe it was the unions who were the baddies.

The ICT teachers themselves were obviously happy with the current undemanding curriculum, and fearful of moving out of their comfort zone. I do blame the head teachers for not sounding the alarm, but they too were probably scared of upsetting the status quo.

Or was it just the inbuilt inertia of the senior civil servants in the Department for Education? There was little media pressure for change, and the sheer scale of scrapping the current curriculum and thinking up a computer science equivalent was just too daunting.

The ministers in change at the DfE during the period 2007-2010 were not techie enough to understand that there was a problem. And Gordon Brown’s government as a whole had long lost Tony Blair’s 1997 belief that IT would transform government. There had been too many computer cock-ups in the meantime. So, it was no wonder that there was inertia. As a result, a generation of children were short-changed, including my grandson.

I don’t often praise the coalition government, but it has taken up the cudgels. It happened as a result of the 2011 national curriculum review when the British Computer Society, Computing at School, technology skills specialist e-skills UK, the ICT association Naace, innovation group NextGen/Nesta and the Royal Society, all condemned the current national curriculum for ICT.

Education secretary Michael Gove reacted to the pressure finally on 11 January with a speech to BETT, the industry body for educational IT, in which he absolved schools from using the existing curriculum. He emphasised that “ICT will remain compulsory at all key stages”, but did not specify in what form it should be taught.

He seemed to imply that schools should make it up as they go along. He harked back to the golden age in the early 80s, when a thousand flowers bloomed on the back of the BBC micro. This new golden age would be similarly built around the £22 Raspberry Pi. New Computer science GCSEs would spring from the brighter schools, and be networked to spread to the less endowed. These GCSEs could be included as an option in the English baccalaureat.

This is a lovely unbureaucratic un-top-down vision, which appeals to those greying policy-wonks, who were young in the 1980s. It would be nice if it did work, but I have a nasty feeling that you can’t recreate a chaotic golden past. I foresee punch-ups in Cambridge pubs, as in the 1980s, but this time it will between writers of competing computer science GCSE curricula. An academic discipline, like grown-up computer science, needs a bit more structure nowadays. Otherwise, how can it be marked and ‘Ofsteded’?

At a meeting last month of the parliamentary ICT forum on the topic of these reforms to the curriculum, several speakers were worried that many headteachers, strapped for cash, would give up on ICT altogether, and not bother to think up and implement a computer science replacement curriculum. This is urgent, as there are now only four months before a new curriculum has to be in place.

So, come September, in many parts of the country, computer education may be in an even worse state than the deplorable mess it was in until now. Be careful about what you wish for.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

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South London and Maudsley trust launches online health record

Mental health trust launches patient-held electronic health record MyHealthBox

South London and Maudsley foundation trust has launched an online health record that gives patients direct access to their health records.

The MyHealthBox web portal uses Microsoft’s HealthVault platform and allows patients to contribute to the system directly. According to the trust, it is the world’s first patient-held electronic health record in the field of mental health.

The online service allows patients to store and manage their own health information. It also gives patients the opportunity to choose what information is shared and who it is shared with.

South London and Maudlsey said that the aim of the new system is to put patients at the centre of care and allow them to be actively involved in decisions about their treatment.

Although the system has just been officially launched, the trust has been working with Microsoft on the development of the technology for a some time, with the trust announcing its plans to create the system last year. Speaking to Guardian Healthcare at the time, the trust confirmed that it was delivering the system outside of the National Programme for IT. The web portal also gives users information about medication and support, emergency contacts and opportunities to get involved in activities and research. The trust said that it has worked with local GP practices to develop information exchanges between MyHealthBox and GP electronic record systems.

Mike Denis, South London and Maudsley’s director of information strategy, said: “This is not just about giving people access to their health records. This approach encourages a two-way flow of information between patients and their clinicians.

“It will provide patients with integrated information that gives them more control over their health and wellbeing, empowering them to make informed decisions and provide meaningful input into their own care plans and treatment methods – which will ultimately lead to better patient care. The heart of this is about openness, transparency and choice.”

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

West Midlands organisations team up for online criminal records checks

Public sector organisations in West Midlands say they are making savings by sharing online Criminal Record Bureau checks system

West Midlands public sector organisations involved in a partnership for online Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) checks have said the collaboration has helped drive up efficiency and reduce staffing costs.

According to West Midlands Councils, which brings together all 33 local authorities in the region, careers site WMJobs is the first partnership of public sector organisations in the country to deliver online CRB checks. The WMJobs website is managed by West Midlands Councils on behalf of 28 public sector organisations in the region.

Under plans to move away from a paper-based process, save money and improve the recruitment process of frontline posts, the WMJobs system is being supported by Capita’s e-bulk service. Coventry city council, which carries out up to 6,000 CRB checks every year, said it is on course to save up to 44% on staffing costs since the implementation of the system last July.

“e-bulk has dramatically improved our recruitment service. We receive online applications from candidates within 24 hours, which is far more efficient and means we can place people in jobs quicker than before. We can also check an application’s progress as it goes through,” said Jane Crawley, HR recruitment manager at the council.

While Capita’s online CRB service inputs the same information as the previous paper based version, the checking process has been simplified as the new system eliminates data errors, helping to prevent delays and reducing manual administration.

Manny Sandhu, senior people and leadership consultant at West Midlands Councils told Guardian Government Computing that working solely with paper was problematic at times and could be quite time consuming. She said that the new service had had positive feedback from the organisations involved.

“It’s been very successful so far, and it is definitely more efficient than the paper based system that was in place before. It’s about collaboration and driving down procurement costs, because we’re purchasing as a partnership,” she said.

Sandhu also revealed that other regions had expressed interest in the the new system and wanted to find out more about how the partnership was delivering the service. She said that West Midlands Councils welcomed sharing best practice with other regions about how it had implemented the new process.

The region, which has a history of collaboration, believes that its WMJobs partnership is on course to save more than £2.6m across the West Midlands by 2014.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

Bletchley Park: where government started computing

The wartime codebreaking centre is preserving the British government’s leading role in creating and developing electronic computers

For every £40 spent by the UK state sector, nearly £1 goes on information and communications technology; well over twice what we spend on roads.

Yet just 70 years ago, the electronic programmable computing on which all ICT depends was just a theoretical concept in the minds of visionaries such as Alan Turing. Calculations were made by humans, sometimes with the aid of machines, but these were mechanical and electrical.

At Bletchley Park, a country house and estate by the train lines and communication cables from London to the north-west, the government employed Turing and his peers to turn the concept of electronic programmable computing into reality, in order to crack the sophisticated enciphering machines of the Nazis. The work, which some historians believe shortened the war by two years, was blanketed in secrecy, and remained undercover for decades afterwards.

No longer. “Bletchley: Home of the codebreakers,” reads the town sign. Pointers to Enigma Court, a new housing development named after the most famous enciphering equipment broken by the park, appear miles earlier.

Bletchley Park is now a collection of museums which show how rapidly computing developed during the desperate years of war. In September 1940, former university student Mavis Lever used pencil and paper to make a key breakthrough in cracking Italy’s naval cipher, contributing greatly to Britain’s first major naval victory in the war, when it sank five Italian ships at Cape Matapan on 28 March 1941.

To crack the Enigma field cipher machines, in March 1940, based on a design by Turing, the park introduced ‘bombes’, electro-mechanical machines that hugely speeded the checking of possible combinations after cryptanalysts had narrowed these down. The cryptanalysts prepared ‘menus’ – what they thought might be parts of the Enigma settings for the day – and the bombes ran the missing elements until (or if) they found a match.

Now, a rebuilt bombe clatters away on the ground floor of the park’s main museum, just past the largest public collection of Enigmas and Alan Turing’s trousered teddy bear Porgy. But as a sign makes clear, the bombe is not a computer.

Colossus is. A recreation of the world’s first electronic semi-programmable computer fills much of a room at the National Museum of Computing, in Block H at the edge of the park.

It took engineer Tommy Flowers 11 months to build the first Colossus at the Post Office research station at Dollis Hill in London, and is thought to have attacked its first message at Bletchley on 5 February 1944, looking for combinations used by Nazi Lorenz machines used to encipher teleprinter traffic (generated by machine, unlike the hand-tapped Morse code used to send Enigma messages). A second version went online just before D-Day, contributing to the 18,000 messages a day the park deciphered in the weeks following.

After the war, the Colossi were used by the London forerunner of GCHQ, and remained secret until the 1970s. It has taken the museum nearly 15 years to rebuild one, on the site of the ninth original machine acquired by Bletchley Park.

While a Colossus has been reconstructed, the museum’s Witch is the real thing. Later this year, the museum hopes to reanimate the Harwell Dekatron, later renamed the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computer from Harwell, which it believes will become the world’s oldest working extant computer. The machine, already on show at the museum, was built in 1949 for the Harwell atomic power station in Oxfordshire.

“Its job was almost mundane – to produce mathematical tables,” says trustee Kevin Murrell, a job that had previously fallen to teams of luckless graduates. In 1957, a college in Wolverhampton won a competition to take it on, and used it for many years, with local firm Chubb borrowing it to design key patterns. In 1973 it went to Birmingham’s science museum, where Murrell saw it in as a teenager. Years later, he recognised its control panel in a photograph taken of something else by a colleague in a museum store. Later this year, Murrell hopes to reunite Witch’s three designers, all of whom are still alive.

As well as sheer age, the six foot high, nine foot long Witch is a fascinating machine. It uses Dekatrons made by Ericsson to calculate in decimal, rather than the binary transistors used by virtually all computers since. Its 90 ‘stores’ (rows of Dekatrons) can each store eight 0-9 digits – equivalent to about 3 kilobytes of binary data – and each digit is visible through the position of a yellow light within each Dekatron.

Having covered UK government’s first uses of computing for military and research purposes, the museum also commemorates its first municipal use – in Norwich. In 1957 the city treasurers department spent £37,000 on an Elliott 405, with the option of an 80% discount if it returned it within a year. The museum has photos of deliverymen in white coats moving Fred (fiendishly rapid electronic device), higher than the men and covered with a drape reading ‘Elliott Electronic Computer’, down from a truck and towards a worryingly small door.

And it has a later Elliott 803 among its collection, which is merely the size of several desks, with 16k of core memory in an eight-inch cube of metal and a further megabyte on a spool of familiar looking tape – it is magnetised 35mm Kodak camera film. When the museum’s machine has successfully loaded software, it plays a tune to show it is working.

Elliott, a British firm, also spawned the UK’s first software house – when programmer Dina St Johnston, who had written the applications for the Norwich treasurers computer, left the firm to start a family, and in 1959 set up Vaughan Programming Services. The firm continued independently until 1996.

The museum has numerous other treasures: an 8Mb three-foot wide hard disk that has recently served as a novelty coffee table; an Ericsson air traffic control screen installed in 1978 at West Drayton which needed two separate computers to run it; a five foot high black Cray Y-MP EL supercomputer with a massive red ‘click here to launch the missiles’ button on its top; and a Marconi computer the size of several large wardrobes, which used its 8k of memory to help run a nuclear power station at Wylfa on Anglesey from 1961… until 2004.

A room dedicated to personal computers has the feel of a Curry’s in a time-warp, with items such as a 1984 Apple Mac (128k for a cost of £1,600) and a Sinclair ZX81 (1k, but just £70 ready-assembled).

There is also a wealth of products from Acorn, which fought its compatriot Sinclair to dominate British home computer manufacturing in the mid-1980s, including an entire room of working BBC Micros. The machines, built to the corporation’s specifications to accompany its IT education work, were bought by most schools. The museum’s learning co-ordinator Chris Monk used to teach in a room like this – and is now doing so again, with groups from schools, colleges and universities who are studying ICT skills or computer science, but are unused to computers that encourage – in fact, insist – users to program them.

Monk says the BBCs, which when switched on are instantly ready to accept Basic computer code, were a great way to introduce students to programming. “It’s very accessible,” he says. “You couldn’t hurt it. You couldn’t damage it. You couldn’t go onto the internet and see stuff you shouldn’t see.” Groups now are encouraged to get a taste by typing in short programs from books, then messing about with them. Currently, Monk’s education groups have a ratio 25 boys to each girl: the museum is planning to offer days for primary schoolchildren, partly with the hope of interesting girls in coding.

The museum also accepts corporate groups, and recently entertained British chip designer ARM – which was spun out of Acorn to exploit the low-power chip it had designed. Acorn made its last computer, the Phoebe, in 1998 (on show here), but ARM dominates its global market, with chips in the vast majority of mobile devices sold. Hermann Hauser, one of Acorn’s founders, is another recent visitor.

The museum relies on donations, of time, money – and exhibits. Would it welcome any ancient hardware from the British state sector, which less than 70 years ago started it all off in this very building? Murrell says firmly: “We would welcome the option.”

* The National Museum of Computing is usually open on Thursdays and Saturdays and for guided tours on Tuesdays: check website for details. The rebuilt Colossus is open daily and is included in guided tours of Bletchley Park.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

Service Birmingham faces value for money review

New Labour council to investigate whether joint venture between Birmingham city council and Capita is delivering service improvements

The incoming Labour administration at Birmingham city council has confirmed its plans to review Service Birmingham when it takes power next week.

An independent organisation will be commissioned as soon as possible to investigate whether Service Birmingham, the council’s joint venture with Capita, is delivering value for money. Although the Labour group accepts that the relationship with Capita has delivered financial savings, it wants to ascertain whether the relationship has also delivered service improvements.

Ian Ward, deputy leader of the Labour group, said a number of councillors wanted better visibility of the service improvements that the outsourcing relationship was delivering.

“The description of value for money covers two elements: the savings generated and the service delivered. For example, are messages received at the contact centre being processed and acted upon? It has not been easy for councillors before now to get a clear picture of how Service Birmingham is performing,” he said.

Service Birmingham was first set up in 2006 as a joint venture between Birmingham city council and Capita to help drive service transformation across the authority.

Its goal was to improve services, cut costs, increase employee motivation and benefit local citizens. The partnership was extended from an original 10-year contract by five years until 2021, and also expanded to include a revenues service which has been in operation since April 2011.

Stewart Wren, chief executive of Service Birmingham, said: “It is our understanding that a review of the business transformation programme in Birmingham will take place under the new administration. Service Birmingham has supported the council in delivering the transformation programme and we encourage the new administration’s decision to carry out this review as soon as they are able to validate the significant achievements made.

“We look forward to seeing the terms of reference for the review, which are yet to be confirmed, and we are committed to remaining honest, open and accountable about the support we have provided to the council on this programme.”

According to Capita, the business transformation programme has implemented technological capabilities that allowed the council to deliver around £244m worth of savings by early 2011. The programme is on track to deliver savings of more than £1bn over 10 years.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.

Child maintenance accounts hit by inherited IT problems

National Audit Office finds Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission computers are unable to keep tabs on child support payments

Problems with IT systems at the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC) have left it unable to report payment arrears properly, the National Audit Office (NAO) has found.

CMEC, which took over responsibility for statutory child maintenance schemes in November 2008, inherited two primary child support IT systems – the Child Support Computer System (CSCS) and Child Support 2 (CS2) – from the former Child Support Agency.

In its report on CMEC’s client funds, the NAO says that neither CSCS nor CS2 has full reporting functionality for arrears and that the commission believes the cost of rectifying all the known issues on the two systems would outweigh the benefits.

In March last year CMEC was using a clerical database to manage some 100,000 child maintenance cases, against 86,000 in March the previous year. The NAO says these cases were transferred from CS2 because problems with that system prevented them from being processed further.

But the report says the commission had discovered that the opening arrears balances on these cases had not been entered onto the clerical database when the cases were transferred from CS2.

“This meant that arrears on these cases would be understated by reporting only the closing balance on the database as the arrears for each of these cases.”

In addition, CMEC had identified a system fault on CS2 affecting cases which have been cancelled or withdrawn on the same day that a maintenance assessment is completed on the case.

As a result, about 3,000 cases continue to charge arrears as the maintenance assessments do not have an end date. A system fix has been introduced which is expected to resolve the issue going forwards, but the cases already affected have yet to be corrected.

The NAO also found that a number of cases managed using the clerical database, had “not been maintained accurately in respect of the maintenance due”.

Examples of the problems include some child support cases showing that no payments from non-resident parents are due, when the absent parent should be shown as being required to pay.

The report says that although the commission has made some progress to correct cases retrospectively, this work has not yet been completed.

More positively, the NAO found that CMEC is improving the accounting information available from its inherited IT systems and there is now increased evidence about historic problems.

Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said: “Accuracy of maintenance assessments continues to be a challenge. The commission is continuing to improve the accounting information available, so that the historic problems affecting the accuracy of arrears data are more visible.

“Nevertheless, the commission still has a significant challenge in collecting the arrears that have accumulated since the beginning of the maintenance schemes.”

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