Thursday, 2 May 2019

Written adjournment responses

Responses have been incorporated in the form supplied by the departments on behalf of the appropriate ministers.

Thursday, 2 May 2019

Western Victoria Region secondary schools internet access

In reply to Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (5 March 2019)

Mr MERLINO (Monbulk—Minister for Education):

I am informed as follows:

The Digital Hub proposal has not been supported by the Department of Education and Training because of the costs, complexities and risk burdens that the proposal places on the education system.

AARNET, does not provide student appropriate internet filtering, requiring each school to implement and maintain their own technical protection technologies, which are expensive and complicated. Adding cost impost on schools, diverting valuable school resources and places an unnecessary liability and burden on Principals and School Councils.

Risk and complexity is not confined to individual school or schools, using AARNET. The introduction of a third party network exposes the rest of the state-wide network, other schools and the Department to network-based attacks, viruses, malware, and ransomware. AARNET is not a member of the Whole of Victorian Government Telecommunications panel, which governs public service procurement in this area.

The cost to taxpayers of setting up separate infrastructure and supplier arrangements to Victorian government schools who are already serviced by a fibre optic network and benefiting from state-wide IT investment cannot be justified.

Leveraging existing investments is our greatest strength as it enables us to fulfil our obligation in the Education State to put the right policy and organisational settings in place so that every Victorian government school is better able to do their job for the benefit of all their students.

A program of bandwidth upgrades where undertaken through 2018 to lift the minimum bandwidth provision to 100 Mbps for the Geelong and Surf Coast Government Secondary school members of the GSSC.

This was a first for any network of schools in the State and presented an opportunity to trial, demonstrate and inform the potential for further rollouts and capacity planning for maintaining school bandwidth in alignment with the adoption of a digital curriculum.

AARNET is an academic research network that is not designed to cater for a whole jurisdictions school. The capacity on offer far exceeds the current needs of the schools.

The Department is working with the commercial organisations on the Whole of Victorian Government TPAMS panel to develop the next connectivity solution for schools that will be able to scale, when and if required, to capacities delivered by AARNET, without Government needing to redirect investment funding to these organisations.

As part of the development of the next connectivity solution there will be opportunities for Schools in the Geelong region to pilot the solution(s).