RM gets Stoke BSF education deal

A contract award notice, published on 11 November, says that RM Education will deliver a wide range of technologies. All Stoke schools will be linked to a city-wide learning platform and central infrastructure services, including authentication, backup, disaster recovery, web filtering and caching, email and firewall. Secondary and special schools within the BSF programme will get an ICT managed service. The contract contains an option to extend ICT managed services to other establishments for children and young people, and to manage and maintain a wide area network. Stoke on Trent is among a small number of councils which have yet to complete their BSF programmes. In July Michael Gove, the education secretary, ordered the end of the 15 year programme, which was aimed at upgrading secondary schools with new buildings and ICT.