The BSF ICT managed service has had a lot of mixed press of late. We discuss why this is and what can be done to ensure you get the managed service you want.
Filed under: Conversations | Tagged: andy davies, bsf, education, ict, Managed Service, nigel spear, procurement, schools |
BSF conversations 
I worked for EDS and BT at a senior level. I know a lot about outsourcing of government services. This blog is unbalanced and talks more about contracts than delivery of good ICT services. But then again outsourcing often does get diverted by contracts and requirements, rather than delivery! Maybe next time you could get a wider ranger of views for your podcast? All many schools want is a choice ie if the managed service offers good value they will pick it, if not they will continue with their own ICT development plans.
My experience of TUPE is very different from the one you describe: the LEA Human Resources person told us categorically that all staff will be tupe’d over to the new school (in this case an Academy) and if we choose not to we are “deemed to have resigned”. No mention of redundancy whatsoever. I shall be looking to see if 50% or more of my job description is something outside the “technical” element that a managed service provider might offer.
Im not an employment lawyer so please dont take my views as advice, but I have sat in many meetings where this issue has been discussed. Logically what you describe doesn’t make sense to me. My understanding the of the process would be:
1. You job/role is outsourced
2. You have the right to go with it (ie Tupe to the service provider)
3. If you dont wish to do that, you still have a contract of employment with the LEA (you haven’t broken it)
4. Your job/role doesn’t exist now in the LEA, therefore they either have to find a new role for you, or pay you for doing nothing (unlikely) or offer you redundancy
The net result is the same but I would imagine redundancy is worth more to you than resignation.
I would be really interested to hear from anyone suitably qualified on this matter.
Tim, agree with all your comments! We deliberately do not script any of the podcasts (which I’m sure is self evident!) as the idea was to stimulate a conversation. It is highly likely that they will be unbalanced especially as we are trying to keep the time down. We would love to get more voices and views on the podcasts, are you putting your hand up?
Agree especially with your final point about choice, but of course a school does not get the option to selectively opt out. Its all or nothing!
On this website
http://www.xperthr.co.uk/faqs/topics/4,47/transfer-of-undertakings.aspx?articleid=57198&page=&mode=open#57198
it states:
If an employee in a TUPE situation refuses to transfer, will he or she be entitled to a redundancy payment?
The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE Regulations) have the effect that an employee’s employment automatically transfers to a new employer. The employee’s job carries on as before with the only change being the identity of the employer. The fact that the employer’s identity has changed does not, on its own, give the employee the right to prevent the transfer of his or her contract, or to complain of constructive dismissal. Regulation 4 states that, where an employee informs either the original employer or the new employer that he or she objects to becoming employed by the new employer, this will have the effect of terminating the employee’s contract and he or she is not to be treated for any purpose as having been dismissed. This means that a refusal to transfer will mean that the employee has in effect resigned. It follows that there is no entitlement for the employee to claim a redundancy payment.
Graham, thanks for the link. I wonder if the ruling is the same if less than 100% of your job has moved to the new service provider? This seems to protect the employer much more than it protects the employee
To comment about something other than Tupe or complaining about the podcast!
I would like to address the issue of why MSP is unpopular with some schools. In my research it is often more successful schools that have difficulties with the idea. It is not so much the concept as the process that is the problem.
The fundamental idea of providing processor and storage as a service like power is a good one.
The problem is in the detailed division of responsibility and control. We get electricity on demand from the sockets in the school but we do not have a rude 12 year old at the end of a ‘help’ line telling us we can’t cook chocolate cake with the electricity because they (the MSP) do not think it is safe for potentially obese students to eat it!
That decision is for the teacher, not the service provider.
Here are some of the points that I think are relevant from your podcast (other than tupe).
1) The firms are not all new to managed service. RM have been doing this for years and they have improved radically as a service provider in the last few years.
2) Stuff not in the contract.
There are so many examples! A very good point.
The MSP contract seems to cherry pick the profitable stuff but the nitty gritty of day to day care eg, tidying up cables, fixing connections to miscellaneous class room equipment etc. Is not taken care of. In ours school we have technology savvy staff in each area who have enough skill and good-will to keep an eye on things and make sure that minor stuff does not disrupt use of workstations. A good example is where someone has hijacked a patch lead for their laptop and not plugged it back into the workstation. Very common and without someone keeping an eye out, it takes the workstation out of commission.
These staff get a pay-back in terms of flexibility in the service they get when they want to innovate. An MSP takes this personal involvement completely out of the equation.
If the member of staff gets a locked down laptop that does not allow them to use processor power and connectivity as they see fit, why should they continue to do unpaid service in their area. It is not the MSP (or the LA) whose role it is to decide whether a teacher’s technique is appropriate or even efficient, they are there to provide a service as are the LA. It is the role of the governors and SMT to manage the school. This is all human stuff we are talking about here, it is about letting teachers feel they are in control, of what they do. That way, they stay motivated and on-side.
3) Derogations. As well as getting obvious outputs from the the technology, so our ideas of what we want to do are shaped by the technology as we learn about it. Otherwise we just end up using the technology to replicate what we used to use a blackboard to do.
In our current situation, we are continually evolving how we work and what we offer the students.
The minute you involve a contract then you introduce a rigid set of use-cases for the equipment.
For example we happen to think that it is a good idea to give students choice of as much as possible about how they use IT, at the same time we have to make it easy for teachers to manage their classes. To this end we use a wide range of (mainly) open source services. These range from various pam modules to allow cross platform authentication to a range of web services that are mostly open source (Moodle, Sage, groundworks/Nagios SRSS Apache VPN etc). None or about none of these are going to part of the Base system offer from the MSP.
We are working on this but my impression is that the derogations necessary for the MSp to provide the level of service we currently have will be more than we can afford. That is assuming the procured MSP has any experience of SRSS for instance.
4) Exclusivity of access.
I think our way through might be to get the MSP to provide services at (say) ldap level to allow us to continue using services that they can’t afford to supply for us. Your idea about restructuring risk against the payment mechanism is a good one. The contract could be formulated in such a way that the MSP was secure about the SLA but did not require everything to be locked down to an extent that broke the extra services that we wanted to continue provide. In simple terms, if an experimenting teacher breaks their laptop and loses their data because it has to be imaged then there is no penalty on the MSP. I think we could live with that.
5) The Alternative Business Case is the ‘nuclear’ option of the school. A route we do not want to use. But my-word, what a grubby little process. It says a lot about the mind set of PFs that
a) You can’t find the ABC document in their ‘library’ even if you search for it by its exact name! and
b) It is the only document in which they feel it necessary to include this interesting and rather defensive phrase.
“Legal advice has been sought from the DCSF/DIUS Legal Adviser’s Office which confirms that the proposed process is legal.”
You only do that if you think that a significant part fo your audience might feel that the process lacked equity.
Despite the fact that the boss of PFS has said that
“It is possible for a school to opt not to be part of the managed service… ”
The process is hidden, secret, and very difficult to access.
6) The output spec for a school like ours has to include technical issues if only at the level outlined above. Furthermore, the school spec is a schedule on top of the LA one and there appears to be no mechanism for dealing with conflicts between the two.