Editorial: Technical training drifts

However, in April 2023, the MEP decided to interrupt the agreement with the Foundation, citing weak reasons and unclear evidence, which were quickly refuted by the same sources cited: a study by the Latin American School of Social Sciences ( Flacso ) and the State of Education itself, whose coordinator, Isabel Román, recommended “taking advantage of the experience accumulated by projects such as Pronie , since the path taken can help to narrow the digital divide more quickly and address the effects of the educational blackout. ”

The FOD receives resources from the Ministry of Environmental Protection to implement the program, but it is not limited to teacher training. It also manages the needs for computers and other equipment necessary for the development of teaching models approved by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the estimation of new equipment needs and the generation of contracts for the purchase of new equipment, the replacement, storage and management of obsolete equipment, the application of equipment guarantees and other logistical and administrative matters. For this purpose, an average of 20 billion pounds per year has been implemented since 2018, under the supervision of the Comptroller General of the Republic (CGR) and the Ministry of Finance itself.

At the time of the dissolution, MEPs did not seem to understand the issues. Four months after the end of the agreement with FOD, it had not even removed 50,193 new assets (computers, servers, storage units, network and wireless communication equipment, etc.) and 164,814 related items (computer equipment accessories, headphones, mouse, Briefcase), valued at 12.485 billion euros.

However, in June 2023, the education authorities included in the 2024 budget items a budget line item of £8.578 billion for the purchase of communications equipment of £5.341 billion, computer equipment of £1.313 billion and for the payment of other items. The Ministry should know that according to the CGR’s resolution R-DC-00132-2022, any acquisition plan exceeding £235 million is classified as a major tender. Therefore, the contract with these resources will take at least eight months to be finalized. This is why institutional suppliers are required to submit documents to initiate a priority 1 procedure (as in this case) from December 2023.

However, these resources were not taken into account in the procurement plan or the budget plan traceability report for the first quarter of 2024 for those responsible for procurement. That is why it was not surprising that the Director of Educational Technology Resources (who had requested the budget) resigned in April over the implementation of this budget. Since recruitment only started in January, this was impossible to achieve.

Given these facts, it is worth asking whether the Ministry of Environmental Protection is prepared to conduct technical training without the support of a foundation with extensive experience and the ability to execute budgetary resources as effectively as the Secretary of Finance. Does the Ministry of Environmental Protection have enough staff to manage and deliver tens of thousands of devices across the country?

A recent event seems to provide an answer. Due to the impact of the epidemic on the education system, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Science, Innovation, Technology and Telecommunications (Micitt) asked the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (Sutel) to purchase 78,116 computers and 8,696 tablets worth about 35 billion pounds in 2021. The devices entered the country in March 2022 and were delivered to 3,572 education centers. A few weeks ago, Sutel warned that less than half of them were turned on and connected to the Internet. He knows this because the European Parliament has required these devices to be provided software Monitoring to understand your geographic location and configure parental and usage controls, as well as other elements designed to measure device usage.

Minister Anna Katharina Müller does not believe Suter’s report, but does not provide data on the use of these devices, precisely because the European Parliament does not have sufficient control. If one day, the technology training program launched this year will not meet the limited expectations of covering less than half of educational centers. As stated in the ninth report on the state of education published in 2023, after the termination of the agreement with FOD, “the Higher Education Council ended a pioneering approach in Latin America and internationally recognized by UNESCO”, which means “a serious weakening of the teaching model of educational computing taught in the country.”