As a computer industry veteran with some experience of bidding for very big government contracts, I found my attention was immediately seized by the figure of £224 million. Automatically, I replaced that with “…somewhere north (possibly very far north) of £1 billion”. But then what’s a billion or two in these interesting times, when governments fling hundreds of billions or trillions of our money around with careless abandon?

The potential for abuse of such a comprehensive database, accessible by so many people – many of them unvetted and poorly paid – seems indisputable. But without even opening that discussion, think how much could be achieved with “£224 million” (or whatever the real cost will turn out to be) if it were distributed among our schools. How many more trained teachers, decent classrooms, textbooks, even adequate lockers could we afford?

Ambitious high-tech projects based on naive assumptions and utterly incredible vendor assurances are routinely advocated by those who know least about the technology in question. Needless to say, our dear leaders are counted among these engineering innocents. They would far rather spend the taxpayers’ money on a “highly advanced database system” than on boring old teachers and books. Unfortunately, since they don’t understand either IT or traditional teaching, they are among the least qualified to make such decisions.