Blair should go back to basics

Here we go again. Who remembers those wonderful old BBC Micros of the early 1980s, widely encouraged by educationalists, Auntie Beeb and politicians alike?

These cream boxes, we were promised, would usher in a new era of computer literacy among children.

I know of one fee-paying school locally which, as recently as a year ago, was still trying to teach its under-10s how to program a BBC Micro, the tuition provided by a part-time pensioner who couldn't understand why the youngsters didn't share his passion for REM or 'Go To' commands.

What the Sega-savvy youngsters knew, and what the teacher presumably didn't, was that technology had moved on significantly since Basic and that the real point of a computer as far as the youngsters were concerned was just to use it. PCs had already become commodity items and to drive them didn't demand programming expertise.

But it looks as though there could now be a repeat of yesteryear's mistakes, this time built around the Government's National Grid for Learning initiative, which over the next few years will soak up billions in taxpayers' money.

How much of this will cascade into dealers' coffers is a moot point, given that much of the market already seems dominated by the likes of Microsoft, traditional IT suppliers to the education sector and local authorities with their preferred PC partners.

In fact, a survey by the British Educational Suppliers' Association reveals that there are now more than 820,000 PCs in circulation in the nation's 23,500 primary schools and 4,600 secondary establishments, including 65,000 of those beloved old BBC Micros. The survey also reveals that nearly half of school PCs are networked around NT servers and that 99 per cent of platforms are Windows-based.

What the Government's Learning Grid initiative will do is further entrench Microsoft's position, especially as the aim is to integrate school PCs with the internet - we can also guess the most likely choice of browser, US anti-trust suits permitting.

But let's assume that the billions spent on educational IT results in the majority of schoolchildren having access to a PC. We should be asking what we hope to achieve as a nation - greater programming literacy? If so, the money could be better spent on targeting those with a inclination towards Java.

Extended research facilities? True, the internet might afford this, but in a year or two most of us will probably get this via WebTV anyway.

An insight into office, Word-type applications? Again yes, but before long there's every chance these will be rendered obsolete by speech recognition and similar advances, taking us back to the wisdom of trying to persuade a bunch of 1980s children into understanding outmoded programming skills.

Meanwhile, here's a command for Tony Blair and his cohorts: invest the Learning Grid money in the three Rs. In other words, go back to basics - plural.