Ok, let's liven things up with a bit of MS scandal :-) Ping Chad! UK Schools applying for Specialist Status, can now be sponsored by Microsoft.
The rules for specialist school sponsorship have been in place for about 12 years and are as follows. 1. Sponsorship should not link to commercial interest in any way 2. Sponsorship in kind should be valued and be substantiated as worth this value to the school. 3. Supplier sponsors in general need to sign an agreement not to supply the school during the life of the specialist school 4 year plan. Software and consultancy time have been ineligible full stop until the government set a precedent by allowing Oracle to sponsor schools last year valuing their contribution at 25K. Now MS sponsorship is valued at �15k, software and a consultant to advise on IT strategy. Commercial interest? How likely is a MS consultant to provide advice that is not locking the school into MS products? With BECTA (Governments advisory body for schools IT) about to say schools can save money by adopting FLOSS, how likely is a MS consultant to advise the school to use OpenOffice.org? Valuation of the sponsorship. I talked to a school that has been given sponsorship by MS. They said they had most of the software anyway but it helped trigger the �0.5m in additional funding. So it costs MS nothing to get a firm foothold in this school and a lot of free publicity at taxpayers expense. Future supply. If a school buys a PC it will have a MS operating system on it so after the sponsorship starts they will be buying further product from MS, something other sponsors are prevented from doing. If a small British company offered schools sponsorship either in software or consultancy it would be ineligible. eg I have an electronic registration application. I value it at �10k, which is not unreasonable in the general market place and I say OK, I'll sponsor 100 schools with it so I'm a �1m sponsor. Why is it that my sponsorship will be rejected whereas MS and Oracle's is accepted? Your trusty Education Lead is writing to the relevant government department to arrange a meeting to discuss the matter in more detail :-) -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd
