Partnerships for Schools chief executive Tim Byles said: "Building Schools for the Future (BSF) is not about taking things away" (School plan is to build, not demolish).

BSF will not be delivering the IT service, the service provider will, and it will wish to minimise costs to maximise profit.

So while BSF may not take things away, the service provider will - especially the IT technicians from schools - and allocate them centrally to save costs.

Proper consultation is  impossible because of the structure of the project. I participated as a school
governor in a consultation exercise. The local education authority (LEA) BSF IT team imposed last-minute changes in its contract with schools that seriously disadvantaged all the schools.
There was nothing the school governors could do about it. We could only discuss the school-LEA agreement, and not the real driver, the LEA agreement with the service provider.

On career development, some school technicians are working in schools because they want to serve their community and do not want to work for a large corporation.

They knew the job did  not offer much by way of opportunities in the  careerist sense, but offered different prospects.

Their choice to serve an identifiable social unit whose values they share  are destroyed by BSF IT.

The fundamental objection to the BSF IT project is that it is bureaucratic and anti-competitive. The LEA chooses the service provider prior to negotiating the terms of the contract, so the other businesses which might have bid are excluded before the exact service is  defined.The alternative approach would be to set interoperability standards and standard service contracts to create a genuine market in which
local suppliers and service  organisations could bid, and where individual schools choose to buy a service.

BSF IT is just a way of  diverting public money to large corporations in the guise of providing a service to schools. It is bad for the schools and bad for small UK IT  service providers.

Roger Hill, school governor