Government to close Becta

The Treasury's decision to close the education ICT agency Becta by November, cutting £80m from this financial year's government budget, has dismayed its 240 staff – and some teachers who found its work especially useful because it provided a central platform for standardising on technology.

The move has been made as part of the government's wider programme of cuts worth £6.2bn for 2010-11.

"Naturally we are very disappointed at the government's decision," said Becta's chairman, Graham Badman, and chief executive, Stephen Crowne. "Becta is a very effective organisation with an international reputation, delivering valuable services to schools, colleges and children.

"Our procurement arrangements save the schools and colleges many times more than Becta costs to run. Our Home Access programme will give laptops and broadband to over 200,000 of the poorest children. Our top priorities now are to make sure we have an orderly and fair process for staff, and that as far as possible schools, colleges and children continue to benefit from the savings and support that Becta has provided."

The organisation employs 240 staff and 120 contractors. On its site, Becta says that £1.5bn has been spent through its procurement agreements since 2002, and that this has saved the education system £223m – which would be an average of about £28m per year. It also says it has achieved cost savings of £55m for educational institutions and providers including schools, local authorities and the skills sector in the past year alone.

Early reactions were that Becta has been useful, and that closing it will lead to losses in expertise which will have to be made up by extra spending elsewhere. Paul Wareing, now an iPhone developer but for eight years a Becta employee, mourned its passing. He cited achievements such as the creation of the National Grid for Learning, launched in 1998, which provided a gateway to online educational resources; the Self-Review Framework, which let schools assess their own use of ICT; and Laptops for Teachers, which got teachers who might have been unfamiliar with computers to use them.

"It was the envy of the world," Wareing wrote on Twitter. "The cost of its loss will be much more than the saving of its cost." He pointed to its initiatives such as work-based learning, offender learning, adult and community lending as well as schools and home access which will be ended – or shifted to other, less prepared agencies.

Fred Garnett, another Becta supporter, commented: "[The] Becta closure won't save £62m & must hit Home Access & inclusion initiatives. The use of inaccurate term quango indicates sleazy politics."

Becta was also seen as having played an important role in driving down the cost of computers to schools. In 2005 it produced a paper suggesting that schools could halve their IT bills by adopting open source software rather than Microsoft's Windows and other applications. In 2008, it suggested that schools should adopt more open source software – which led to Microsoft dropping some of its costs for licensing software to schools.

Other teachers contacted the Guardian to cite Becta's ICT Baseline, which let teachers rate their ICT provision, as an example of good practice put in place by Becta.

The question now is whether the closure will indeed reduce overall costs of public sector spending.

Becta, formerly known as the British Educational and Communications Technology Agency, was set up in 1998 to promote the effective use of ICT in education. It has admitted that, although schools are being kitted out with the latest technology, only one in five is using it effectively.

The agency already faced a budget cut of almost half its £112.5m annual spend over the next two years. The money was provided by the former Department for Children Schools and Families.

The official Treasury document on the cuts says that they aim to "cut Whitehall waste and protect schools spending".

Becta has been promoting Home Access, the former Labour government's scheme to bridge the "digital divide" by ensuring all children have a computer at home. It has encouraged English secondary schools to integrate the online reports into virtual learning environments so parents can see what their children are doing in the classroom.

It has also been promoting the adoption of ICT to enable people studying for diplomas in vocational subjects to move between schools, colleges and work placements.