The UK government has awarded £19 million worth of contracts to improve digital maturity and enable leaders in the field of education to make data-driven decisions.
Digital technology consultancy Scrumconnect and public sector IT provider Aire Logic are the recipients of the two-year contract.
Both companies will work alongside the Department for Education’s Operations Infrastructure Group and support its software developers, testers, architects and DevOps staff to design, build, maintain and run digital services, enabling schools and education authorities to access DfE support services more easily.
The projects, which will support the government’s most recent budget pledge to spend £1.4bn of capital investment in the renovation and modernisation of schools across the UK, will focus on four key initiatives.
These initiatives are focussed on procurement; school technology services; a digital data hub called Schools Account as well as improvements to UK schools’ physical infrastructure and construction.
More access to data
A second two-year project worth £3.1 million will see Scrumconnect and Aire Logic working with the DfE’s Advanced Analytics Division to develop its Modernising our Reporting Environment (MORE) programme.
The initiative aims to make the sharing of data more efficient for education institutions. This will see existing infrastructure and platforms migrated to the cloud, and a new self-service data tool that will be built from scratch.
Initiatives within this project include the DfE’s data warehouse migrated to Microsoft Azure, to help make future updates and integrations more efficient.
The two firms will also modernise the government’s educational data platforms to help education institutions’ reporting and decision-making in areas such as school attendance as well as modernising the platform so that it can run on Microsoft Azure.
This, claimed the two firms in a statement, would help to improve collaboration and the sharing of data.
The contracted companies will also provide a new ‘self-service data query’ tool to help users pull data from the Further Education Data Warehouse.
The DfE said that the tool will be based on the detailed analysis of user requirements and will use data science to drive decision-making.
“It’s vital that education institutions have the tools to make effective data-led decisions,” said Mark Duncan, chief digital officer at Scrumconnect Consulting.
“We’re excited to be partnering with Aire Logic to bring our expertise in user centred design to these important DfE projects. This will enable DfE to build better digital services and user journeys and put vital data in the hands of education professionals.”
“Supporting education in the UK through technology solutions is an increasingly critical part of both the Government’s and our own mission,” said Joe Waller, co-founder at Aire Logic.
“As two like-minded companies with a history of success in modernising the public sector, we’re perfectly positioned to deliver solutions that match the Government’s ambitions around innovation and creating digital services that deliver in the long-term,” he added.
