WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY....
WHEN A FROZEN SCREEN COSTS MORE THAN MONEY
Comment by DEBBIE CALLAGHAN, Marketing Manager at RISO UK P
icture this. A teacher walks into a classroom with a carefully planned lesson. She’s got 30 pairs of eyes waiting for her to bring algebra to life on the interactive whiteboard. She presses the power button. Nothing. A frozen screen. Thirty seconds of awkward silence turns into five minutes of whispered side-conversations and drifting attention. By the time the projector stirs back to life, the class has already slipped off course.
Now multiply that moment by over 900 teachers across the country recently surveyed by ASUS. According to the survey, secondary schools lose an average of 37 minutes a week to frozen screens, crashed systems and wheezing computers. Over a year, that’s 1,334 hours of lost teaching time, the equivalent of wiping out weeks of lessons for an entire school. Staggering numbers.
And this isn’t about minor inconvenience. It’s about opportunity cost. Schools are meticulously scrutinised for attendance percentages, lesson outcomes and curriculum coverage, yet the silent drain of outdated IT goes largely unquestioned. We’d never tolerate a boiler that failed every third day, yet somehow we accept classrooms that limp along on machines over a decade old
The irony is that the “cost-saving” choice (eking out another year
from ancient kit) often turns out to be the expensive one. Not in the IT budget, but in lost learning hours, reduced teacher morale, and even staff retention. (Almost half of teachers in the survey said poor tech directly dents job satisfaction. That’s goodwill on your staff that needs to be made up somewhere else to keep them happy).
There’s a simple behavioural truth at play here: people notice the upfront price of new equipment, but not the hidden cost of old technology. Old equipment might feel like a saving, but inefficiency has a price tag. It’s measured in wasted staff time, in contracts with external engineers, in short-term fixes that quietly balloon long-term costs. And unlike line-items in a budget, those costs don’t announce themselves neatly. They drain confidence, continuity, and performance.
Which raises the real question for leadership teams: is your IT genuinely supporting the school, or is the school propping up the IT. Maybe it’s time we stopped asking “Can we afford to replace this?” and started asking “What’s the real cost of keeping it?”
Because when it keeps happening, a frozen screen is worse than an inconvenience, and more than just an annoyance. It’s a lost opportunity for 30 children, in 30 UK classrooms, every single day. That isn’t just a teaching issue, it’s a leadership issue.
ENERGY OPTIMISATION IN EDUCATION
Comment by NIGEL AYLWIN-FOSTER, Director at ReEnergise
S
chool budgets are tighter than ever. Whilst most schools now have a longer-term interest in achieving net-zero, and all schools are required to have a Climate Action Plan in place, the immediate challenge is more often than not to save money on energy usage. What to do? The answer is arguably to focus on energy optimisation. In my view, energy optimisation means ensuring all aspects of a school’s buying, generation and use of energy have been rendered as efficient as they reasonably can be. Using less energy and generating more of it on- site will reduce operating costs and save money. This is also part of the recognised route to net-zero: first be efficient and reduce energy usage then deliver what energy is still required via renewable means. Any reader who has looked at this previously will know that there are many options for energy optimisation and to some extent the challenge can be working out how to prioritise. (Personally, I like the expression ‘optimisation pathways’ because – like the idea of a roadmap to net-zero – it conjures up the idea of a journey and progress.)
The received wisdom seems often to focus on fabric improvements, encapsulated by an outstanding example of alliteration in the phrase ‘fabric first’. However, this can be misleading. A team of leading engineers recently studied empirical data derived from various school surveys, to determine the effectiveness of optimisation measures in the real world. These were then colour-coded red, amber, green (RAG status) to indicate their varying effectiveness.
Of course, the view on effectiveness does rather depend on what one is trying to achieve and which parameters are being assessed, which meant that the team derived several versions of the RAG status. But in terms of financial payback, fabric definitely wasn’t first.
The image shows a snapshot from a much-simplified version of the relevant RAG chart. In this case the RAG boundaries were: • Red – does not pay back in its lifetime.
October 2025
• Amber – pays back but not in under 10 years •Green – pays back in under 10 years.
I’d caution against getting too fixed on the precise numbers here: this was just a sample and the results for a given school will depend on the details of the situation. However, there are some clear trends and it’s interesting to note that some measures that are often taken as a given in schools – such as double glazing – rank so poorly in financial terms. Conversely, there are some plant room measures that are relatively cheap and will pay back quickly.
I’d note two takeaways from this brief foray into energy optimisation. One: it can save schools money and is definitely worth pursuing. And two: school estate folklore should not be taken for granted. Any school estate needs to be assessed holistically before investing in optimisation measures, lest the school wastes money or time on the wrong measures.
www.education-today.co.uk 23
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