Learning Platforms - what ARE they for?

Anyone who thinks a Learning Platform/MLE/VLE will bring a new era of secure, guaranteed access or high speed connectivity for all please first take a look at the National Health Record and appointment booking system, the junior doctors' job application scheme, the Probation Service, MOD pay, the Court Service, in fact almost anything EDS or Crapita have touched in a decade, then we can chat some more. To see how well online tools and services work in education and the value for money they offer, check out e-learning credits / Curriculum Online, the Learning Schools
Programme, the BECTA Self-review Matrix, then Framework, then revised SRF and perhaps to round it off the Interactive Planning Tool and the New Primary Curriculum website - I could go on but the point is surely made?
We have no guarantee that an LP will work faultlessly for all of our pupils or all of our staff, all of the time - if what I have seen of the LGFL and Kaleidos in action is anything to go by we must limit our expectations.
More information for and involvement of parents has been touted as a driving force but I have seen no real evidence of an upswelling of demand for SIMS data 24 hours a day and at weekends – parents can get any of it easily already and rarely do.

I do see yet another brilliant opportunity for media and digital infrastructure companies to hoover up gigantic amounts of public money, which could be much better spent elsewhere in education, with little proven benefit to our pupils.

My real fear actually lies with where this tosh is all heading:

personalised learning, which smacks to me of depersonalised teaching. All work and resources will eventually have to fit into the requirements of the LP – SCORM compliance will feature ever more for sure.

remote access, which conjures up a nightmarish vision of huge 'classrooms' full of computers, patrolled by heavily armed HLTAs keeping order amongst battery rows of kids hunched over screens, with 1 teacher per cluster of schools 'managing' the system, uploading 'content', either from home or an office, possibly outsourced to a subcontractor on another continent. No need for teachers, all the marking being done electronically. Just think of the 'savings'! Just think of the IT contracts! The necessary 'super' classrooms are already going into new build schools.

anytime access - while we still have teachers they will of course be able to work from home in the evenings and at weekends: being able to report ICT faults/repairs, set or collect in work when ill, on leave or otherwise engaged – the first is actually being promoted in my area as an advantage!

inspections - once the Safeguarding the Child agenda has frayed a little at the edges we can be certain that 'effective use of the school's learning platform' will become a criterion in the OFSTED attack dogs' menu of things to brand schools as failures with.

increased workload - sometime in the next 2 or 3 years my SMT will wake up to the fact that we have an LP, which will have languished on remote servers gathering cyberdust for a while, and pressure to use it and fill it up with stuff will doubtless mount. That deathly phrase used in headteacher briefings and staff meetings: 'OFSTED will be looking for ….' is certain to guarantee that.

For the immediate future I can't see the point for our primary school. Only 70% of our children currently have access to the internet at home but of course more public money is to be poured into the Home Access programme to rectify this and thereby enable the LP policy – more easy profits for the providers of the underpowered and overpriced packages on offer. Homework is not a major plank of our Teaching and Learning, so that will have to change, again to justify the existence of the LP. Forums and wikis will be of little use to most 3-8 year olds, so schools will be busy buying many £s worth of LP content: the education publishers have already geared themselves up for it as a brief perusal of subject coordinator junk mail will prove – the sounds of a thousand hoovers and cash registers ring in my ears! I have yet to witness the universe in which young people will curl up with their new home access computer and choose to spend an hour at the weekend or in the evening on the school's Learning Platform - how could social networking sites, instant messaging, music and film clips or downloads, gaming or image browsing possibly compete with the exciting world on offer there?

Learning Platforms do provide useful educational tools, no argument there, but they are all available for free already. Schools and teachers wanting to use those tools do so. Their function as a resource bank can easily be provided, again for free or very cheaply, via third parties or via a school's own website. Electronic calendars and notice boards can be made available on most school networks. The only feature which is difficult to provide by other means is the access to school data for parents- was it just a quirk of fate that moodlers had so much trouble getting Crapita to cooperate over SIMS? I'm sure it was and that their motives are pure - but then, as argued, I see little call or use for that access, interestingly the only part of the LP agenda which schools are required to provide.

No-one has as yet inspired me with anything but dread in the face of another government inspired, unwanted, unnecessary, ear-bleedingly expensive 'e-solution' which will drain the human, physical and financial resources of schools whilst dragging T+L down by actually undermining the quality of both and distracting teachers from their proper focus on them.