Wonderfully helpful, thanks very much.
I'm making slow progress -- seems they've done a lot of customizing, so getting it to log me in without referencing their own website is a bit of a challenge. I think editing the sql dump to keep it from creating and populating user accounts will help with that.
The course_data makes sense as you've explained it, so I'll drag that over next.
Are there any working conversion tools that will migrate these courses in a batch from v1.9 to 2.x MBZ format? All the ones I've found so far are hit and miss and some appear to have been abandoned some time ago.
There are a few dozen schools that need their data migrated, and the local authority in charge isn't in a position to upgrade their existing Moodle server hardware to support v2. Are there UK based Moodle consultants out there who have done this sort of thing?