The National Grid for Learning could transform the way hooked-up parents educate their children, as Stevie Kennedy explains

It sounds like one of those pat government slogans, but the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) is shaping up to be one of the Internet-ready parent’s most valuable online assets. Since its launch in 1997, when a meagre £100 million commitment attracted criticism from most sections of the press, NGfL has been transformed with a further £700 million in funding and the involvement of companies from across the IT industry.

Most parents, however, are still in the dark about what NGfL aims to achieve. At its most basic, it is an attempt on the government’s part to ensure that all schools and colleges - and most libraries and community centres - have adequate Internet access by 2002. On top of this drive for more connectivity, the Grid aims to encourage education Web sites with content that is curriculum-approved, train as many teachers as possible in the use of IT in the classroom, and even digitise some of the mountains of information in our public libraries. In all, the total investment between 1998 and 2002 is over £1 billion, and every parent with a dial-up Internet account will be able to make the most of this huge programme.

Now, NGfL is an ambitious project, and no-one is pretending that it means every school will be transformed into a hooked-up haven of the best that education and IT can manage between them, but it does mean that every school kid will have more and better information available to them through the Internet. The peripheral benefits will be more quality Web sites for homework and home study, and the assurance that these sites, being part of the Grid, are of a guaranteed minimum quality.

To take a quick tour of the Grid, which even in its early stages can offer help to parents, go to the home site www.ngfl.gov.uk and register as a user. This takes minutes and you will end up on the main page from where you can access the Grid’s various sections. From here, you can go to the Learning Resources Index, where a search form enables parents to search for sites that the Grid’s administrators have passed as ‘of educational value’.

Try looking for homework resources, and you’ll find, among other results, a link to SchoolZone www.schoolzone.co.uk. You’ll also notice, from the search results, that each site is listed with a geographical location, a contact name for the site administrator, and a phone number. This gives parents a great deal more information than an anonymous link thrown up by a standard Internet search and, as local resources are built into the Grid, this sort of information will prove invaluable.

The site in question, SchoolZone, is run from Cheltenham and has over 30,000 links to educational sites across the Web. As this is an approved NGfL site, you can be sure that it doesn’t have links to any of the Web’s less savoury content, offering instead links to some of the best school-oriented sites on the Internet.

Back on the NGfL home page, you can follow the link to ‘Community Grids’,

a growing number of sites run under the auspices of local education authorities. Try the Staffordshire Learning Net http://www.sln.org.uk/ and you’ll find, among other things, a list of local school Web sites, a guide for parents, and links to education resources. As we’re still at an early stage in the Grid’s development, most of these sites are still growing to include more content, which will be funded in part by the government’s investment over the next four years.

Existing sites within the Grid proper include the Parent Centre http://www.dfee.gov.uk/par_cent/index.htm, which offers masses of information and statistics on schools, performance tables, notes on how children are assessed, and much more. Another site, aimed at teachers but ideal for keen home educators, is the Virtual Teacher Centre http://vtc.ngfl.gov.uk, which has classroom resources that can both help parents to understand the sort of lessons their children go through, and use those same resources to back up the lessons at home.

Another superb resource is the Web site of the National Year Of Reading http://www.yearofreading.org.uk/, which aims to improve literacy in school children of all ages. The site contains advice for parents on how to get pre-school children started on reading, pointers to the best sources of school-age reading material, and information on learning for special needs. A notice board is available for anyone to leave information about literacy events or ask for help from other users of the site, and there’s a monthly newsletter containing information on the latest events.

As far as the hardware is concerned, a lot of the connection work is already under way, and U-NET have recently signed contracts to provide connectivity for all schools in both Cheshire and Gwynedd county council areas. Other councils are taking similar initiatives to ensure that their schools take advantage of NGfL funding, and the encouragement of private-public financing means that parents who connect via the ISPs that involve themselves in the Grid will benefit further.

In future, this could mean that parents in areas hooked up by U-NET, for example, are able to connect from home on special reduced monthly charges, or that extra services are available to them as users of the Grid. Only the larger ISPs will have the resources to add so many school users to the Internet at one time, of course, but there will be enough of these to give parents plenty of choice.

The National Grid for Learning is not an instant quick fix for the UK’s education needs in the new millennium, but it is already a much-needed boost for school connectivity and a high quality resource for parents who use the Internet and want to make that connection work for the benefit of their children. By auditing and organising much of the Internet’s existing content, and gradually adding more sites of a guaranteed quality, the Grid could be your best bet for a return on the investment in that expensive PC and modem. Click on your U-NET connection now and start to take advantage.