NCET was a charitable trust funded by government and formally a Non-Departmental Public Body. It had a Council, whose Chairman and Chief Executive were responsible to the Secretaries of State of the Education Departments in England, Northern Ireland and Wales. Its work was outlined in an annual priorities letter from the Department and a senior civil servant and HMI sat on its Board.
People
Chief Executives
The Chief Executive was employed by the NCET Council to run the organisation and deliver its programme of work.
With the increased resource being provided to schools for educational technology the NCET took on a role of piloting and evaluating new technologies. NCET's role was to provide appropriate evaluative evidence to them to ensure that this money was well spent. It also looked to help grow viable and appropriate commercial markets for IT products and through a number of NCET managed pilots and procurements it stimulated specific areas, for example, the introduction of CD-ROMs into schools. Similar initiatives of varying scales and technologies including portable computers for teachers, communications technologies, multimedia desktop computers, satellite technologies and integrated learning systems all contributed to keeping UK schools up to date with the changing pace of the technology during the 1990s.
Research
As well as providing equipment and materials it was also part of NCET's brief to collate and disseminate research and case study evidence on the impact of IT on learning and educational institutions and to produce support materials for them. This included support for the Education Department's Superhighways Initiative from 1995-7 which ran 22 projects-supported by £12 million from commercial sponsors-that focus on the application of electronic communications in schools and colleges.
Publications
Managing IT Inspecting IT
NCET-TV
NCET-TV was a series of educational TV programmes aimed at helping the UK's teachers gain relevant IT skills. As part of BBC 2's The Learning Zone, the programmes will be transmitted on the first Wednesday of each month at 4.00am.
Renaming to form Becta
Dennis Stevenson was asked by Tony Blair in 1996 to look at the use of computers in schools. He set up an independent enquiry, a panel of experts who took evidence from a wide range of bodies and individuals and published his report in March 1997, just in time for the forthcoming election. Following the election Dennis Stevenson advised the UK Government that NCET could be a useful organisation, but it needed to be more closely aligned to government and should be restructured. The organisation was renamed the British Educational Communications Technology Agency, restructured and given the task of developing "The National Grid for Learning" .
