Microsoft deal with Welsh state schools extended
An agreement which gives all learners at Welsh state schools free access to Microsoft 365 at school and at home has been extended, following a new licensing deal.
Accessed through Hwb, Wales’ innovative digital learning platform, learners and teachers can download Microsoft 365 services at home, for free.
Wales’ was one of the first countries in the world to provide this initiative and since its introduction in 2019, over 1,450 schools have benefited and over 122,000 families, saving them £84.99 for a personal Microsoft 365 licence.
Devices
Alongside access to software over 320,500 devices, including laptops have been funded via the Hwb programme.
Cabinet Secretary for Education, Lynne Neagle, said: “We were one of the first countries to invest in this way to support access to Microsoft 365 and building on this work, we are once again able to fully fund access for schools.
“This year we have invested £12 million in schools’ digital provision, and are fully committed to enhancing schools’ digital environments, with £167 million invested since 2019. This includes providing devices for learners and practitioners to ensure equity of access to digital technology.
“Having one agreement funded by Welsh Government demonstrates the commitment to digital equity and inclusion for our learners and help to ease the financial pressure on schools, enabling them to maximise the benefits of digital technology in education.
“Many learners already benefit from this agreement, but I want to raise awareness that these digital services are freely available for learners and teachers to use at home.”
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The Welsh Government and the Senedd should commit to supporting Free, Open Source Software such as LibreOffice, GNU/Linux and other similar software instead of being tied down by unnecessary expensive contracts that take money out of the education budget. Free Open Source Software is free for commercial but especially for educational purposes. Instead, the Welsh Government could look at funding a FOSS coding group that would support such projects and give back to the open source community at a fraction of the cost. More so, we need to diversify and reduce our reliance on American for-profit tech firms that do… Read more »
There’s no such thing as free software when you consider the total cost of ownership.
The best argument for not using US software is national security now they are no longer a trusted partner.
What do you mean considering the total cost of ownership? Free Open Source software is maintained by volunteers and does not require any payment in order to use.
To be clear, the government would not be required to spend stupid sums of money.
There’s a cost of deploying it, maintaining it and providing user support. The helpdesk needs to be staffed by people who have the right knowledge but they will be harder to recruit (more expensive) than those with more knowledge of common products. The same is true for the back office teams. Then there’s the extra user training which probably costs more than the per seat user licence. Then there’s the risk that the volunteers stop maintaining it without warning forcing everyone to disruptively and expensively migrate to a different product. Then there’s the productivity impact trying to share documents or… Read more »