It should have been a bureaucratic nightmare: Thirty-three separate entities in London, England, charged by the national government in June 2000 to provide broadband connectivity to the city's schools by 2006. But the group banded together, creating the London Grid for Learning (LGfL), a collaborative consortium that built the network within budget and a year ahead of schedule.
The end-result of all their efforts is a broadband network that connects 2,600 London schools, scattered across 620 square miles and populated with 65,000 teachers and more than one million pupils. “We think it's the largest educational network in the world,” says Tim Stirrup, development manager for LGfL.
And the boasting doesn't stop there. In a presentation to chief education officers, Doug Brown, head of the information communications technology in schools division at the Department for Education and Skills, called the grid “the best educational broadband infrastructure in the country and probably the world.”
The grid project started in April 2001 in response to an edict from U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair to encourage schools to increase Internet connectivity. The project fell under the purview of local authorities (LAs), committees that provide such things as education management, resources and services. Rather than implement separate (and more expensive) projects, London's 33 LAs formed a trust, providing greater economies of scale.
We were digging up roads in central London, and routing fiber through tunnels and under the Thames. It was quite a challenge. —TIM STIRRUP
It wasn't easy, says Mr. Stirrup, who credits Brian Durrant, chief executive of the project, with navigating the tricky political waters. “He had to get the local authorities to agree to work together, which hadn't happened in the United Kingdom in general,” he says. “But he sold it that we could do things more efficiently, effectively and save money by working together.”
Mr. Durrant worked his way through the elected bodies of each local council and finally got buy-in from each LA to create the grid. Each LA put £1.2 million of a government grant toward the creation, upkeep and upgrade of the network, with schools picking up the tab for the connection fees.
The first step was to get the core network in place, a process that wound up taking two and a half years.
Instead of using copper wire, “we looked to the future and did fiber, putting it into the ground,” Mr. Stirrup says. That turned out to be no simple task in a city where streets have been in place for hundreds of years. “We were digging up roads in central London, and routing fiber through tunnels and under the Thames. It was quite a challenge,” he says, adding that the team needed the permission of local councils to do all that digging.
“There were a lot of problems in pushing fiber through ducting that's been there for a long time,” agrees Ian Lehmann, operations manager for LGfL. “Eighty-five percent of the ducting had a problem of some sort.”
The work also involved coordination between the companies contracted to build the network, including:
- British Telecom (BT), which owned and laid the physical fiber optic cable
- THUS plc, which served as telecom provider
- Synetrix, which built the core network and is the managed service provider.
Getting the players to work in lockstep and allocate resources was a frustrating exercise at first. “In the early days of 2002, BT had a limited number of staff skilled in laying fiber optics,” Mr. Lehmann says. “At one stage, the capacity to deliver the lines just wasn't there.”
The network was in grave danger of falling behind schedule as the backlog of schools waiting for connections grew, and the group battled to get roadwork permits. Once those were secured, the road crews had to be ready to move, but suppliers wouldn't allocate resources without more notice. “This is an initiative that went to the highest level of the government, and it was just going too slowly,” Mr. Stirrup says.
So Mr. Durrant shook the trees to get the suppliers’ attention, persuading Charles Clark, the Education Secretary at the time, to meet with them. “It was one of the things that spurred people on as they realized the importance of the initiative,” Mr. Lehmann says.
After that wake-up call, the team collaborated with BT and THUS to implement a triage process that bumped LGfL construction requests to the head of the line. “If they had a team of guys available to dig up a road, and three choices of places they could go, our requests were given a higher priority,” Mr. Stirrup says.
The group also telescoped the decision-making process by holding meetings at BT’s complex in Gatwick, where many of the key project players worked. “We realized that we had to get to the people who were in a position to make decisions,” Mr. Lehmann says. “By meeting at Gatwick, we could frequently get action on problems before the meeting was completed.”
The resulting network has two core locations linked at 20 Gbps and extends out to aggregate points in the suburbs that provide low-cost fiber optic connections to each school on the grid. In addition, LGfL provides services such as spam and URL filtering.
Top of the Pops
Once the network had been put together, the team planned to introduce a wealth of educational content through a portal available to every London teacher and pupil on the LGfL. “This was actually the tougher bit,” Mr. Lehmann says. “We have the grid to a stage where it's like electricity—you know it's going to work. Now the thing is getting people to actually use it.”
The group knew it needed to rely on a carrot rather than a stick to get schools online, however. “We were very careful to make sure that while we offered connectivity and learning platforms, the choice of what to use and what to leave was ultimately up to each individual school,” Mr. Stirrup says.
So the project team hired five curriculum consultants to work with the schools on an ongoing basis to find out what they want and help them fully exploit what LGfL has to offer. “We instituted an ‘ask, not tell,’ policy and got input from educators about what they wanted to do as a school,” he says.
The team also tracks what is being used and reports backs the figures at each editorial board meeting. “It's like talking about a pop music chart,” says David Mason, content manager at LGfL.
Getting schools to access content was more that just picking the right materials, however. The team had to provide support and make the grid simple to use, he says. “ We wanted to spend more time in front of teachers explaining the grid than we did at our desks, always remembering that our timescale was such that we had about 90 seconds to persuade the teacher,” Mr. Mason says.
We knew that any impediment placed in the way of the user will reduce usage by 80 percent.
—DAVID MASON
Taking a Pass
One of the early roadblocks faced by the team was the need to restrict access to premium content. “We knew that any impediment placed in the way of the user will reduce usage by 80 percent,” he says. The team simplified security by developing a system based on an open source Internet2 program known as Shibboleth, allowing authentication without passwords or usernames. LGfL's efforts garnered the 2006 public-sector project of the year award from computing.com. “Shibboleth had a dramatic effect on the volume of traffic to the grid—it tripled in a matter of months,” Mr. Mason says.
LGfL now hosts a raft of software and learning modules that teachers can access by grade level and subject as well as services such as videoconferencing that bring subject matter experts into the classroom. Moreover, LGfL has branched out to provide collaborative spaces for educators to reach across schools through discussion boards and forums, Mr. Stirrup says.
To ensure a strong local voice in how the grid grows, the not-for-profit company is administered by an executive board of trustees consisting mostly of LA directors of children's services as well as professionals drawn from information communications technology and education fields. “Involvement at the local level is vital,” Mr. Stirrup says. “If the authorities and schools have more control about what goes on, they are more likely to work together.” For example, LGfL could have chosen a URL-filtering technology and force-fed it to the schools. Instead, LAs “can change the main product in line with their local needs,” he says.
The team has built on the model by using the network to offer hosted services. For example, its Pan London project allows LAs to centralize and streamline the admissions process to secondary-school transfers. “It used to be that parents would hedge their bets by applying and accepting places at more than one school,” Mr. Stirrup says. Schools would then often find themselves with empty spaces as students made their final choices. Now, LAs can use the network to collaborate on admissions, meaning that a child will only get allocated one space at one school.
LGfL is still growing—some schools still don't use it very much, but more and more of them are starting to see the benefits, Mr. Stirrup says. And as a collective unit, all the schools have already seen the enormous benefit of savings. “Over a three-year period,” he says, “what would have cost the local authorities £120 million, if they had done it independently, cost £40 million.” PM