Schools urged to steer clear of Vista
A YEAR of lobbying from the men in black has failed to move the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) away from its early decision to kick Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 out of schools.
The agency kicked up a right stink when it said, in its interim report, that schools should not touch Vista of Office 2007 with a barge pole.
Now in the agency's final report, which can be found here, it seems that Becta has decided to stick to its guns.
Becta says that deploying Vista in current setups isn't worth the cash. Only 22 per cent of school PCs in the UK are capable of running Vista "effectively." This is despite the fact that 66 per cent of machines fall under the under Microsoft's definition of "Vista capable."
Becta claims that it will cost each primary school £125 to upgrade a PC and £75 for secondary schools. ICosts will therefore run to £175 million to upgrade schools in England and Wales and Becta said that there was no evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefits.
As far as upgrading to Office 2007, Becta asked the Vole to come up with something evidence that it was worth the money to upgrade but Microsoft could not come up with the goods.
Becta did not like the idea that the Office Open XML file format used by Office 2007 is not fully supported on any other product or platform.
It preferred the ODF format used by OpenOffice.org and Office 2007 could not support that effectively. µ
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While I was away from work (a local primary school ICT tech), someone did a rush order of a new computer without consulting me. 

I was greeted by a Vista machine sporting Office 2007 on my return. Apparently "change" is a better sales pitch, far more important than consistency (the rest of the school is XP Pro with Office 2003).

Unfortunately, this computer is now the Head-teachers (since he had none at all before). I await the complaints about why he can only read his files on that computer, not other machines.

As much as schools might be "advised", few will take notice until that advise is handed out to more than a handful of people who might understand. (Another special-needs school along the road was "planning" to convert to Vista even when it was still in beta).
The becta report does say that upgrading to vista would cost each school about 24,000. We have perpetual licence for our school and that costs me £25 per seat. That entitles me to the latest OS & office so the cost will be hardware and deployment.

We will be going vista probably during the summer.
good choice, 350 million to upgrade... 

i would go with edubuntu for all the education needs. It's free and has everything you will need (including openoffice with full odf support preinstalled)

runs on old or new hardware just as good

a good number of goverments are already doing it