The government announces
copyright licence deals for schools.
Schools across England will save
more than £6.5 million after the government struck deals with licensing
companies for shared rights to use films, newspapers and television shows in
classrooms.
The licences previously had to
be bought individually by schools and local authorities, often resulting in
expensive and time-consuming negotiations.
Now the Department for Education
has reached agreements so that from next month all state schools in England
will be automatically covered for these licences, potentially saving more than
£6.5 million.
The deals have been struck
with:
- the Educational Recording
Agency (ERA), which allows schools to use programmes from BBC, ITV and
other British television channels in lessons
- Filmbank, which
allows schools to show pupils top Hollywood, Bollywood and independent
films
- the Motion Picture Licensing
Company (MPLC), which gives schools access to movies and programmes
created by more than 400 film and television producers and
distributers
- the Newspaper Licensing
Agency, which allows schools to use newspaper and magazine cuttings in
lessons
Schools Minister David Laws
said:
We are committed to reducing
costs and unnecessary red tape for schools. These new licences will allow
schools to focus their resources further on providing an excellent education
for young people.
Jo Warner-Howard, head of
education at the Copyright Licensing Agency, said:
Schools were telling us that
they wanted us to make licensing simpler and easier and we listened to them.
The change will relieve local authorities and academies of the responsibility
for administration of licensing.
The Department for Education is
committed to reducing the administrative burden on teachers to free them up to
teach. The department has:
- cut the volume of unnecessary
guidance issued to schools by 75%, equating to the removal of more than 21,000
website pages
- scrapped the burdensome
self-evaluation forms for school inspections
- simplified complex financial
school budget restrictions
A streamlined inspection
framework has also been introduced. Neither the department nor Ofsted now
expect teachers to produce written lesson plans for every
lesson.
This announcement follows the
government’s recommendations in the Hargreaves Review to simplify the
licensing process for copyright users in the digital age.
Notes to
editors
-
The licences apply to all state
schools, including local authority maintained schools, academies, and other
types of schools such as pupil referral units (PRUs) and special
schools.
-
The savings of moving to paying
for the ERA, Filmbank and MPLC licenses centrally is estimated
by the Department for Education to be £6.73 million in the 2014 to 2015
financial year. These savings are made up of the discounts negotiated on the
cost of the licenses themselves and the savings in administrative costs of
local authorities and schools, who previously negotiated deals
themselves.
-
The central licences that have
been in existence since April 2013 are theCopyright
Licensing Agency licence, which gives schools the right to photocopy
books, magazines and journals, make digital copies by scanning or re-typing for
distribution to pupils, parents, teachers or governors, and make copies of
content from digital material including CD ROMs, electronic workbooks, online
journals and included websites; and the School Printed Music Licence, which
covers the copying of a school’s sheet music for curricular and
extra-curricular school activities, making arrangements of musical works and
distributing licensed copies to school members.
-
The Hargreaves Review was an
independent review commissioned by the Prime Minister in November 2010 to look
at how the intellectual property framework supports growth and innovation.
Chaired by Professor Ian Hargreaves and assisted by a panel of experts, the
review reported to government in May 2011 making recommendations for
government. This included a recommendation to simplify the licensing process
for copyright users in the digital age. Further details about the review can be
found on the Independent Review of
Intellectual Property and Growth’s website.
-
In recent years the government
has consulted the education sector over ways in which the statutory
underpinning of the ERA Licence might be changed in ways that would
allow all the educational uses currently licensed under the
separate ERA and ERA Plus Licences to be brought together
within a single licensing scheme. The new regulations (covering changes to s35
and paragraph 6 Schedule 2 CDPA 1988) are expected to be implemented from 1
April 2014. In anticipation of this, ERA will launch a new single
licensing scheme from 1 April 2014. This will ensure that all licensed schools
are able to make available ERA-licensed resources to students when at
school or online when undertaking school work at home.