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home > Media services > News > VALNET - Succesful validation of school of tomorrow projects VALNET - Succesful validation of school of tomorrow projects The final report for Valnet was published at the end of January. It summarises the result of this unique and ambitious scheme, funded by IST, to validate five IST School of Tomorrow (SoT) projects in 200 schools in 16 countries and integrate them with findings for the other seven SoT projects. The final report makes a number of recommendations, notably to involve teachers actively from the start of projects, consider running short feasibility studies and pilots with typical teachers and schools before supporting a large scale project and giving weight to proposals that produce open source products or can use a range of existing products. Furthermore the report recommends that future projects build in external independent validation and recognise that schools will not risk children's future if projects are not ready for use, not available when promised and not developed in partnership with teachers. The European Schoolnet Validation Network (EUN ValNet) was an accompanying measure funded by the IST programme (IST 1999-14025) to facilitate building knowledge about innovation in schools and help create the conditions for creating schools of tomorrow. The project ran for 41 months. It ended in August 2004 and involved ten partners. Two preliminary underpinning studies and a validation framework made a major contribution to the project. THINK was undertaken to identify key issues facing policy makers and to develop future scenarios for the public education service, and NOW presented a consolidated analysis of four contextual studies of innovative practice .The validation methodology developed a homogeneous framework for validating ICT school pilots focusing on five core dimensions of impact: Pedagogical, Organisational, Economic, Technical and Cultural. Valnet was probably the largest project validation in schools ever undertaken in Europe. The project improved our understanding of the effects and issues related to the introduction of innovative technological tools in schools, in particular the effect of the strong internal cultures in schools. It also led to a deeper understanding of the nature of validation and innovation in schools and identified a mismatch between an innovative tool and innovative practice. It showed the need carefully to select innovative teachers, but found that schools did not see the need to use the School of Tomorrow tools to move towards one of the THINK scenarios. Papers from the project are in the INSIGHT observatory:
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