New NOF programmes

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* ICT training: The New Opportunities Fund, in response to feedback from local education authorities and teachers, has announced the extension of its First Round ICT training programme to cover home- and hospital-based tutors. A further £1m has been added to the £230m programme, of which England will get £755,000 and the remainder is divided proportionally between Scotland, Wales and N Ireland. The extra money will fund another 2,500 training places, and NOF has advised local education authorities how many they have been allocated. It has also set aside contingency cash in the event of individual authorities needing a top-up (such as where an LEA is responsible for a regional hospital serving a wider catchment). The ICT training programme closes on 31 March 2002, by which date teachers must have booked their training provision (they do not have to have completed the training, however, by this date). Nearly 100,000 teachers have still not signed up for training, though. NOF’s policy officer Chris Anderson says this reflects a huge variation in the speed with which LEAs have rolled out the ICT infrastructure in schools that is needed before training can commence. Scotland and N Ireland have been notably slow, which Anderson attributes in large part to the devolved administrations. ‘The main thing now over the next six months is to identify which LEAS have a significantly low level of take-up and investigate on an LEA basis why that is.’ Anderson also points out that NOF is able to be more flexible at this stage of the programme about the possibility of LEAs switching their training place allocations between schools to cope with shifts in training need that may have arisen during the three years the pro-gramme has been under way. Individual tutors should approach their LEA for a training place. The NOF website has a search facility to help teachers identify a suitable training provider. See http://www.nof.org.uk/edu/ict/main.cfm

* CHD/Cancer: NOF has started to roll out its fifth programme in Round Three,to tackle coronary heart disease, stroke and cancer, with the allocation capital equipment to 53 hospitals in England. Of these, 37 will get cardiac angiography equipment; another 16 receive MRI scanners. The MRI allocation is complete, but 43 more hospitals will receive angiography equipment in an announcement next spring. Hospitals are selected by the Department of Health according to criteria advised by NOF. The emphasis for these allocations was proximity: to reduce the distance people have to travel to access important diagnostic equipment.

* Health: NOF has launched a West Midlands pilot of a new scheme to provide free daily fruit to many of Britain’s schoolchildren. The National School Fruit Scheme is part of the CHD and Cancer prevention Third Round pro-gramme, and has been allocated £42m. The full West Midlands pilot will operated from next spring and the scheme will be rolled out in selected English regions up to 2004.