By Tim Ferguson, 16 March 2007 08:00
NEWS
The BBC is to suspend its £150m children's education website, BBC Jam, following complaints made to the European Commission.
The site - which provides free educational content for five- to 16-year-olds - will no longer be available from 20 March following discussions between the BBC Trust, government and EC.
The EC has received a number of complaints alleging BBC Jam damages the interests of the commercial sector.
Acting BBC chairman, Chitra Bharucha, said in a statement: "Whilst we are not currently in a position to determine whether the BBC is non-compliant, as alleged by the industry to the EC, we cannot ignore the allegations facing the BBC right now."
The BBC's future
Read what silicon.com has to say about the Beeb and web 2.0 here.
A BBC Trust spokeswoman added: "To take no action wasn't an option."
The BBC Trust has decided to suspend the service and asked management to prepare fresh proposals on how the corporation can promote formal education and draw on the successes of BBC Jam.
The proposals will undergo a BBC Trust Public Value Test as well as a market impact assessment from Ofcom.
A review of the education services was already planned for 2007 but if the site continued, an interim review would have been necessary. Suspending the site will allow a single review to take place.
The BBC Trust is the independent governing body of the BBC, which is charged with enforcing the six public purposes of the BBC Charter.
Comments
There are 9 comments. Join the discussion
1. Budd Margolis
If the reason is unfair competitive advantage, then the entire BBC web site should be considered as comeptitive not just the educational activity.
£150m of the public funding has been spent on this. Will it be sold? If so, can we receive our fair share back?
20m homes invested over 3 years to build this (excellant) site and its just thrown away?
2. Iain MacKay
At first sight this is very dispiriting. Children are part of the community served by the BBC. Accessible and entertaining educational material is an important part of the BBCs service to them. Without more detail this seems to be penalising the Beeb for doing its job well. Underlying this seems to be a principle that anything valuable has to be appropriated. I don't see where the boundaries are - how this doesn't cut to the heart of the BBCs purpose. I mean, why is Eastenders free (to licensepayers)? Why is the News free? I see a danger here that from interests inimical to the BBC who want to maroon the organisation in twentieth century media and keep the public service ethos out of the internet. End of rant :)
3. Peter Baron
How interesting: the BBC, acting in accordance with its remit to educate and inform as well as to entertain, provides an outstanding service to my children. This is one use of my licence fee that I wholeheartedly endorse. But apparently this is "unjust" and it must be stopped so that a pirates and carpetbaggers collective, acting in accordance with their basic drive of naked financial greed, can eliminate their most effective competitor and hold me to ransome for more money.
Private schools charge fees of thousands of pounds per term yet have people queueing to get their children in because they are perceived to deliver a higher quality education than the state sector. Why should the same law of the market not apply to educational websites? Or do these people only want a free market up to a point?
4. Ruth
So have I got this right? Currently, the UK is producing a generation of children whose grasp of the basic skills of reading, writing, numeracy & oral communication is decidedly lacking. The BBC were addressing part of this problem on their website - for free (well, free to the user). So *the pigs at the trough decided that they were missing out on yet another way to make money & complained to the EU that their money printing schemes were being hampered by the website. And the EU supported the complaints. All I can say is, the sooner the UK leaves the EU the better! * with apologies to real pigs everywhere
5. anonymous
That's great, another service from the BBC which we pay for (via the licence fee) is withdrawn because the competition can't hack it.
Not everyone can afford to pay commercial sites money for things like this, so instead of those sites making more money, less well off kids will lose out.
What people fail to realise is that if something is free people will use it and it will become popular. People who wouldn't necessarily pay for that product if it wasn't free.
6. Chris Mou
Fantastic. Another 'free' BBC service shut down, because its not 'fair' on the commercial companies who charge for similar services.
This seems crazy to me. Firstly - WE'VE ALREADY PAID FOR THE SERVICE! Hence the license fee.
Secondly - this is creating a competetive marketplace. BBC provide the benchmark, and it should be up to commercial companies to make more effort to outdo them. Not many people are going to be willing to pay for a rubbish service just because the free alternative has been shut down.
You dont see Microsoft applying to the Euro courts for Firefox to be banned because its hurting Internet Explorers market share! Microsoft do what they can - they step up their efforts and try to make IE better than Firefox. Which, in my opinion, is exactly what it should be up to the commerical sector to do.
7. David Cairns
Judging from previous comments it is fine for our money to be poured into government projects that could decimate an industry sector, in this case the educational software authors. I guess a logical extension will be downloadable textbooks, but my main concern is the governments engineering of educational content. Britain used to have an education system that worked well because of its diversity and freedom of teachers to teach the content that they saw as important in a way that suited them and the students. We now have a straight-jacketed system that removes the enjoyment from teaching and learning.
With regard to the Microsoft comment, do we expect then schools to be free to use a BBC version of Word, or Excell etc? I think not.
8. ian morton
Yes I do think that our money should be poured into projects that give equal opportunities to all children. We NEED a free service that all children and teachers can access. In this day and age, there is much less real budget to spend, both at schools and in the home. Having a free public service is absolutely neccessary and having it done by the BBC gives us the knowledge that is fair and unbiased.
What will the teachers do now. They cannot choose one commercial site over another, so they will end up not giving any online references to help learning. The poorer children will miss out because their parents don't have the means to pay for extra services and which would they choose anyway. I would find it difficult to choose between any of the commercial companies that I have looked. I don't feel they are value for money and I don't feel that they should be given such a competitive advantage. Maybe there was a lot of money spent on the BBC site, but they are now being penalized for being a hugely succesful web operation. The education site is there because they have the need to provide a complete public service. They have done this admirably and I dread to think of how many educational teachers notes will now have to have all references to web sites deleted. It is a sad day indeed for our children.
9. Ed Carter
The BBC should be commended for the provision of JAM. The service withdrawel is very sad news! It's in all our interest to see excellent resources available to learners (of all ages). Surely public sector development can sit along side private commerce eg. open-source vs. MicroSoft & Apple. What is business worried about (other than personal profit)?
Perhaps the BBC could make more of its excellent content available to education over the Internet using Shibboleth authentication. Business can also pay to join in !