Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

On public private partnerships, I have seen some schools that were developed through that system and they are a credit to the planners. More importantly, however, they take a huge weight from the shoulders of management in those schools, in so far as the latter has no responsibility for the infrastructure of the building, other than to request through the management body that repairs be made. While there probably is a case for developing this, is account being taken of the additional burden being placed on managers of schools who are not in public private partnerships? As members are aware, management structures have been depleted considerably in recent years. Another point concerns expenditure on information technology, IT, which has been a hobby horse of mine for quite a number of years. Schools operate as individual islands, if one likes, apart from their fellow schools, even within education and training boards, ETBs, and the purchasing power for hardware and software, software in particular with regard to the licences being paid for it, is a matter of grave concern to me. However, some time ago with the roll-out of broadband, one would have hoped it was possible to move from stand-alone systems over to a cloud-based system using something like Citrix or VMware, where the dependency on having up-to-date hardware is removed and one can use relatively old hardware to run the latest software. This has bothered me for some time. In the United States, many of the big companies fund education because, of course, the students are being trained in their products. In some Nordic countries, there has been a move away from licensed software to open systems software. How much per annum is being spent? I had personal experience in my own college of how much was spent on information technology and it was a fairly significant sum. I am aware the Department has been examining this issue for some time but has a real move been made towards centralising the purchasing of IT equipment, moving towards the cloud and, if one likes, taking the manufacturers of software and beating them into reality regarding the costs?