Your recent article on the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme (BSF schools to spend £1.29bn on IT by 2012, www.computing.co.uk/2224743) said that Partnerships for Schools (PfS) is celebrating a transformational success. This is not the feedback being heard about our local authority IT managed service – far from it.

We hear that a £7.5m first payment is being withheld from the IT partner for non-performance. IT technical support staff based in these schools are using words such as “shambles” to describe the arrangements. One school was asked if the sixth form could be trained during summer and cascade the training to staff.

As for increased expenditure sounding like development, quite the reverse. Schools will spend more. Why?

First because some BSF schools have not been allowed to take eight-month-old computers with 28 months of warranty remaining into their new schools. Can PfS explain scrapping nearly-new kit?

Second, there is documentation advising schools it is compulsory to spend a minimum of 25 per cent of IT grants on “refresh”, which means in some cases it is compulsory to spend £0.5m in three to four years on kit for schools that may not have suitable infrastructure.

Do schools realise that managed service contracts will cost them about three times their normal IT staffing bill? That despite paying for a managed service which included staff, the shelf price of equipment still has a cost of unboxing it and setting it up in the classroom added on? Does the government not care that they will bleed taxpayers dry as they line the pockets of private companies? There’s a crisis coming, make no mistake.

An anonymous school bursar