What about teachers who don’t use ICT very often? Would they know what to do in a computer suite to save energy? And how do students treat the equipment?
Some green ICT measures recommended shutting down computers after use, but this isn’t practical. I teach in ICT suites where computers are used all day. It would be impossible to turn them off every time they have been used, not to mention expecting students to do this.

As well as practical concerns, green ICT raises funding and responsibility issues, but where will investment come from and where does responsibility lie? Often, not with the ICT department or the technical team. Considering these are the two groups who use ICT equipment the most, you may think they would have considerable influence.

The environment is important to schools, but green ICT will only be an enabler for change if it is included in teacher training.

- Laura Mulholland
Laura Mulholland is a trainee teacher of ICT at south west teacher training

The whole thing started out innocently enough, with one of the academy’s regular enterprise days that focused on the environment. Groups of students designed an eco-classroom with the help of an architect, a structural engineer and Alison Watson, a qualified surveyor and director of Class of Your Own, a company that offers workshops to schools to allow them to address sustainability in a practical way.

‘The challenge was that if they knew their school so well, could they do it better than the professionals,’ says Watson. ‘The intention was to get the children using professional systems like AutoCAD and Autodesk to design their own virtual buildings. The power of the software allows them to throw weather systems at their buildings, monitor them structurally and assess them in terms of sustainability’.

At this early stage the children were constructing simple line drawings in AutoCAD, which they then presented to construction professionals to see which one was the best design. The winning class of 30 children pulled all the best design elements together to come up with the finished building.

Presentations
After a series of presentations, one by 13-year-old Aimee French who made a 10 minute pitch to the local planning department, the children got planning permission for the design. They formed a company called Roots and have since interviewed 18 construction companies in the area to decide which they want to work with.

The success and recognition didn’t stop there. Four of the students involved in designing the classroom went through a Dragons’ Den-style process and got top marks in a competition in the US held by the Council of Education Facility Planners International. They travelled to San Jose for the event and the only reason they didn’t win it, according to Watson, was because it was a professional competition and they didn’t possess an architecture degree between them. But they got something better – a standing ovation from 600 seasoned architectural specialists.

What those architects recognised was that children of a relatively tender age are capable of getting to grips with sophisticated architectural concepts and software. As Watson says: ‘People kept saying to me that kids couldn’t use building information modelling software and I kept saying they could. These children have proved it. They teach each other to use it as they would an Xbox game and they’re teaching contractors’.

Videoconferencing
Andy O’Brien, deputy head teacher at Accrington Academy, proudly echoes this sentiment. ‘Those that claimed this professional software was too complicated for children were proved wrong in half an hour,’ he says. ‘One lad called Dan Rollins, who was introduced to the software on the plane over to the conference, was able to design the basic structure of a house in 3D within 30 minutes’.

Five students also had a couple of videoconferencing sessions with Autodesk in the US where they were talked through using the software. They are now highly competent and the idea is that they produce a series of tutorials that can be used over the web by other students or professionals to give them a video walkthrough on how they can design using the software.

‘Students can quite quickly get a basic grasp of most software, but this highlights the potential of being able to take students to a high level of competency very early on,’ says O’Brien. ‘In the next year or so, our Years 7 and 8 will be introduced to the design software and it will be used across the school. At the moment, there are about 30 students using it. Next year, potentially 400’.

Accrington is one of 56 Schools of Creativity across the country and one of its chief drivers over the past five years has been to look at the use of new technology in schools. It’s all about giving the children a free rein when it comes to technology, according to O’Brien. ‘What we’ve found is the more you give kids ownership and let them solve problems with ICT or software, rather than talk them though it, the more rapidly they pick up the skills they need. Those skills are very transferable.

‘Autodesk, AutoCAD and 3ds Max are simply software suites like many others and are aimed at students who are 16-years-plus and industry professionals. What we’re doing is challenging who can use the software and to what degree they can use it.’

O’Brien cites the experience of attending a conference about four years ago and hearing someone say they had university leavers entering the construction and architecture profession that couldn’t use industry standard software.

Training
Educational consultant Gareth Long is also impressed by what the academy and the children are achieving. ‘This shows that if there’s something children are interested in, they can fly if they are given the chance. They are already using IT for everything in their private lives. They are producing songs and video and uploading content – they are creatively making, packaging and presenting all over the place, and we need to embrace this wholeheartedly in schools. These kids are going to be training other schools and professionals how to use this kit – that’s mind-blowing.

‘Accrington has shown real foresight. It’s built the curriculum around the eco-classroom project. It’s not just an add-on, it’s a genuine piece of work that will have an end result’. There may only be 16 students holding official posts within Roots, but this is a project that the whole school has been involved with. As O’Brien says: ‘There has been a concerted drive to raise the sustainability issue with students educationally and the learning from this one project, while quite unique, will feed back into the school and have an impact on everybody going through the school’.

- Dean Gurden

As concerns grow about the environmental impacts made by modern society and as demands on resources amplify, we are seeing rises in energy costs. Electricity is becoming an expensive commodity, with every 1W of electricity consumed by a computing device costing around £1 per year if left running 24/7. With a typical PC consuming 114W (as quoted by global analyst, Gartner), the costs of running this one PC will be £114 a year.

IT uses a lot of electricity and, in recent years, several organisations in both the education and commercial sectors have done studied their IT energy use. Typically, they found that between 30% and 50% of their electricity bills were down to ICT energy consumption. This is a significant percentage and is not surprising when you think about how few non-IT energy consuming devices there are in such organisations.

With electricity costs set to rise 25% above inflation for commercial customers over the next five years, there is a need for IT to consume less power.
The school IT practitioner is required to analyse usage patterns within their infrastructure to increase efficiencies and work with the bursar to find ways to reduce the electricity bill through the use of smart technology procurement, more efficient equipment and the development and enforcement of power management policy.

There are other costs that relate to electricity as most educational institutions will have to pay carbon taxes, known as CRC.

Carbon
All state schools may have to pay CRC, or at least their local authorities will have to. Some local authorities have already indicated that schools will be billed for their CO2 emissions. With 75% of electricity coming from fossil fuels, that 1W left on all the time is responsible for 5KG of CO2 emissions per year, which is massive. This means CRC tax will be around 10% of electricity bills, rising steeply as the government starts to bring in auctions and reduce the supply of credits in order to hit CO2 targets.

Green IT also raises issues about toxicity and recycling, particularly around harming people, in manufacturing and in use or disposal. There are several materials in IT equipment that can cause harm, a large number of which were mandated to be removed from new equipment under regulations about four years ago through the introduction of EU law. Greenpeace has been active in campaigning against materials that weren’t included in the regulations, but pose a hazard to health. It regularly releases a ‘guide to greener electronics’ and has recently taken industrial action against both Dell and HP in the campaign to have toxic materials designed out of computer equipment. The main materials in the controversy are brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and flexible polyvinylchloride and phthalate plasticisers (PVCs).

Toxicity
BFRs are contained in solid plastics in the chassis of computers, they are not chemically attached to the plastic and leech out. BFRs bios accumulate, which means they build up in the body and don’t dissipate. Several BFRs regularly in use have known toxic properties, some are widespread environmental pollutants and when disposed of through incineration can lead to the creation of more harmful brominated dioxins. Recent tests on animals have shown some types of BFR to cause neurological problems, liver damage and liver cancer.

Discussing the doom and gloom of toxic chemicals is all well and good, but what does it mean for our smart practitioner? The answer is risk, we shouldn’t have children and there should be a duty of care that makes people aware of the issues and requires procurement of equipment that has no risk of harming a member of staff or a student. Avoiding BFRs isn’t difficult, most major brands have BFR free models and the easiest way to tell is to look for a green tick on the buying solutions website.

Waste & Performance
Waste needs to be an issue of lifetime management and it is important to plan the lifetime of ICT equipment to reduce waste and replace when appropriate. A judgement call needs to be made on when equipment has reached the end of its life and this will be a balance between the usefulness of the old equipment and the increased amount of work the new equipment can do using similar or less energy.

If you want desktops to last five years, buy tough desktops and look to purchase the latest high performance technology. The difference between the cost of a Pentium Dual Core PC and an Entry Level Core i3 might be £80, but the i3 is 71% faster and will have a longer lifetime.

You should have a plan for the end of life. One strategy is to donate equipment to the developing world, but this has its own risks in terms of smelting operations employing child labour and polluting local water tables. Reputable charities such as Computer Aid claim to asset track equipment and make sure it is disposed of ethically.

- Peter Hopton

It is often observed that the push towards sustainability and being green tends to take a bit of a backseat during an economic downturn. Schools, like many organisations in the private sector, have got enough to worry about besides their carbon footprints. However, sustainability and making increasingly tight budgets go further aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. In light of this, it’s timely to see how schools are attempting to improve their green credentials. When it comes to ICT, what steps are schools and suppliers taking towards meeting the government deadline for schools to be carbon neutral by 2016?
For many, the first issue is the target date. According to Gareth Long, an educational consultant: ‘It has certainly become more challenging for schools to work towards carbon neutrality with all the budget cuts that have occurred. I’m a governor of a school that is doing its best to be carbon neutral when it comes to ICT use, but there are holes in the doors and gaps in the windows, so I don’t think we’ll achieve the 2016 deadline. I don’t see how many schools can without significant investment’.

From a supplier’s perspective, Zulf Ali, managing director at Zentek Solutions, thinks the deadline is wishful thinking. ‘There’s still a desire for it to happen in the market, but just not under the Building Schools for the Future mechanism. The new academies programme is based around some new build, so there are still things that can be done. Companies like Toshiba provide laptops that are completely carbon neutral from point of manufacture to disposal, but they cost more than normal laptops. All the IT kit we supply to schools can be carbon offset, which can have a massive impact on the school’s target.’
At Becta, which will soon close, director of home access Nick Shacklock thinks the economic downturn has been a fillip to sustainability. ‘The whole green agenda has probably come more to the fore during the downturn because you can save money by being green,’ he says. ‘There’s an incentive for schools to get on with it. And some of it is such simple stuff. Where you used to have signs next to all the light switches reminding people to turn them off, the same principle now applies to desktop PCs. You can do things in a more sophisticated way by getting the network to drive a shutdown, but this isn’t prevalent in schools at the moment. As budgets to spend on ICT get squeezed, schools will look to these things, provided guidance is there’.

Information
Becta’s website is due to freeze at the end of the year, but it will still be accessible until at least March 2011. It contains lots of information and guidance on controlling a school’s ICT carbon footprint. There’s even a calculator that helps educational establishments gauge just how well, or poorly, they are doing in the green stakes. The site also points schools towards a wealth of external, ongoing resources.

Ali agrees with Shacklock that the drive towards saving money and the planet go hand in hand. ‘School budgets are under pressure and they want to reduce their energy costs, especially with ICT being such an energy drain. Any savings made can go directly into teaching rather than spending on technology. Also, in tandem with sustainability and the environment, schools want their ICT equipment to last much longer than. For example, we are getting a lot more requests for thin client devices rather than PCs and laptops. They have a longer life and emit less energy’.

One area where energy-savvy schools are making huge savings is server virtualisation. Although not a particularly new concept, many schools are only just waking up to its potential to reduce carbon footprints as well costs. A school network will usually have many servers, each addressing a number of functions, such as the management information system, the virtual learning environment, printers, and the library. When a system is virtualised, the physicalhardware is replaced with virtual servers that are housed in clusters on a smaller number of machines, cutting back on energy costs.

Virtualisation
One school that went this way is West Hatch High School in Essex. With 10 IT suites and a mountain of learning and administration data to manage, the school had 22 servers humming away in a large room.

Alan Richards, information systems manager at the school., explains: ‘Having taken the virtualisation route, we now have nine physical servers, which means we’ve cut down on the overall power consumption and the cooling needed. Quite apart from the huge carbon footprint of the original setup, it’s made managing the whole thing a lot simpler. And as we’ve got less servers, we don’t need to purchase so many spare parts, and because of the specification of the servers, we can stretch out our replacement cycle further, so it’s greener from that angle as well’.

Some schools have gone even further and completely removed their servers from the school site and access their data remotely via the cloud. According to Ali, the jury is still out on whether having the server offsite and accessing it via cloud computing is more or less environmentally friendly. ‘There’s the argument that when you have your own servers in the school, there’s a lot of latent capacity that’s not being used, especially in the evenings. A designated data centre will optimise use a lot better than the average school. Unfortunately, a lot of schools are a bit nervous about embracing cloud computing, but as more schools embrace it, I think it will have a positive effect on offsetting carbon footprints’.

Virtualisation doesn’t come cheap. So what are the simple things schools can do to reduce their carbon footprints? ‘Turn everything off at the end of the night,’ says Ali. ‘I know it’s stating the obvious, but it doesn’t cost anything, and there are policies in the majority of operating systems that you can set to shut everything’.

West Hatch High School is ahead of the game here. ‘We use a product called PC Power Down,’ explains Richards. ‘It’s a little client that sits on all our PCs and laptops and is then controlled from a central server and we tell the machines when to turn on and off. In conjunction with Windows 7 power management, it shuts down all our machines after a certain time at night. Unlike Windows 7, it can instruct the machines to turn on again in the morning.’ This allows time for software to be loaded without losing teaching time.

Perhaps one of the biggest culprits in raising a school’s carbon footprint is printing. Schools are constantly trying to control this prolific drain on resources. Thankfully, as more teaching is done with the aid of computers, printing has become less of a necessity. ‘The advent of devices like the iPad mean you can read and browse in the classroom much as you would using textbooks,’ says Ali. ‘I think things like the new slate PCs are going to have a profound impact on the reduction of printing. A change is definitely needed, as you’re talking two to three million prints per school per year.’

Printing
West Hatch High School is thinking big on this subject. ‘One of our major projects is trying to achieve a completely paperless school,’ says Richards. ‘We’ve put all the forms we use on the learning gateway and since last September, the school has been doing everything via SharePoint’. Clearly, tech-savvy schools are finding ways not only to do their bit to save the planet, but also to save themselves a bundle of money along the way.
As for the 2016 deadline, Richards says: ‘If nothing else, it’s a goal to work towards.’

- Dean Gurden