John Connell Biography - Cisco Systems

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John joined Learning and Teaching Scotland in March 2004 as Director of the newly-established Scottish Schools Digital Network Unit. This unit was set up to complete the procurement and to manage the implementation of the large-scale SSDN Programme. SSDN is a highly ambitious change management programme for Scottish education, involving the roll-out of a national broadband and content delivery infrastructure, as well as a range of innovative web-based services for every student and teacher in the country. The SSDN National Intranet will bring together a national VLE and a highly integrated collaborative environment, all within the security offered by a national authentication system covering the whole country.

John started his career in teaching and quickly moved into school management, working as a Headteacher in Aberdeenshire and in West Lothian. His passion for the effective deployment of ICT in education evolved during his period working in Scotland’s schools system. One of the drivers behind SSDN is to give Scottish schools access to professional level ICT infrastructure, services and support, and to move firmly away from the amateur/enthusiast period that educational ICT had to work through from the early 1980s onwards.

He then spent 6 years working in local government, before being seconded into the Scottish Executive in 2001. Scottish education has always been fully separate from the schools’ system in the rest of the UK, and Scotland’s newly devolved government therefore took over responsibility for Education from the old Scottish Office. John’s role in the Scottish Executive was to construct a national policy on broadband for schools, and to develop the early concept of SSDN into a viable vision that could be take forward for specification and procurement.

To date, the national interconnect and the national content delivery infrastructure have been delivered successfully across the country. With the imminent appearance of the national intranet, John moved across to Learning and Teaching Scotland to complete the job. The contract for the intranet has been awarded and John is currently busy establishing a joint team within LTS, comprising staff from LTS itself and from RM, the contractor, to take forward the complex implementation over the next couple of years.

John is a trained teacher, and is a Politics graduate from Edinburgh University. He also holds a Master of Education degree from Aberdeen and an MBA from Edinburgh.