January 8, 2021 - 9:37am
When it comes to lockdowns, third time isn’t the charm; statistics around digital poverty are bleaker than ever. Ofcom estimates that over 1.8 million children do not have access to a laptop, desktop or tablet, and 800,000 pupils live in homes with only a mobile internet connection.
The government has failed to deliver on its pledge to provide laptops to the most disadvantaged pupils; by August only 37% of pupils eligible had been able to access a device. Only 51 per cent of households earning between £6,000 and £10,000 have access to the internet at all.
At least during the first lockdown, the government had the excuse that the situation was genuinely unprecedented, and could claim that teething problems were inevitable. 10 months on, and the government has no such defence.
So where is the contingency plan? Individuals, organisations and campaigns such as Devices Dot Now are making valiant efforts, but there is still a shocking lack of leadership and ignorance around the scale of the problem.
Today, it was reported that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson turned down an offer to get free or cheap broadband for thousands of disadvantaged families. Instead, his solution to the problem was telling parents to report schools to Ofsted if they felt that the online provision was not good enough. Teachers are only just recovering from the whiplash of several u-turns around mass testing and exams, and it is an odd state of affairs when Ofsted can inspect schools’ remote lessons, but the government isn’t willing to invest in the infrastructure needed to make remote lessons work in the first place.
There are 1.4 million children on free school meals in the UK; the government could buy every single one of them a £400 Chromebook and 12 months of £20-a-month broadband for roughly the same amount of money (£896m) as the Eat Out To Help Out Scheme (£849m).
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SubscribeIt is not the govt’s job to provide people with laptops. Perhaps instead of straining to come up with yet another role for Big Nanny, govt’s critics could demand that schools be reopened. Distance learning is failing children; it’s only beneficial for adults who are disciplined enough or have schedules that require the flexibility that online classes award. But anyone who believes that a laptop and Internet connection is all that a six year old needs in order to be taught is living in delusion.
Just about every comment is better informed on this subject than Kristina. Typical left solution to every problem – throw others people’s money at it. No intellectual or even practical rigour applied, just a cheap, sloppy, headline grabbing sound bite. So according to this commentator around £1 billion will solve the problem by providing “free” laptops and broadband. The reality is if these kids are as badly off as Kristina makes out then surely it’s right to classify them as disadvantaged and better they attend school for real teaching. Yet this commentator reduces a complex problem to simple solutions. Better to face the fact the education system isn’t set up to deliver lessons across the web. It might be in time but not in a few months. And even if the technology was there does Kristina honestly believe these kids or their parents are motivated or able to use it. And that isn’t a criticism of the kids or parents but a statement of common sense and human nature. We now have digital poverty, food poverty, energy poverty and of course real poverty. Where will it end?
I think the laptop question, or even the rest of it, is a red herring of the highest order.
The real issue is that online education is not very good. Even online programs for university students can easily be crap quality, and they have a high drop-out and fail rate. But primary school education is not at all suited to online work. Even as a literacy tutor, I see every day that working online with students, on one mainly text based subject with one child, is difficult. Some things, like the mechanical aspect of writing which is important in literacy work, are almost impossible. Children are easily distracted, etc. It is much more difficult to find out why they are struggling with something.
Any regular home educating parent will say that even for an online program, right up through middle school and even into high school, you need a parent present. Close by in younger years. And you simply cannot spend hour after hour working online and have a good outcome.
Similarly the piles of workbooks parents are ordering in desperation are not going to educate anyone. Workbooks can be a supplement for kids who like them or to keep them busy for a short while, they do not teach.
Too true. Good teaching is like good theatre; it engages and inspires in a very human, immediate way. Also, young people now spend more than enough time glued to screens as it is!
It is not as simple as providing a laptop to vulnerable children without family support able to support their learning, as well as challenging family circumstances. These children would be better in school just as the workers of key workers.
However the new proposal has been so successfully received in Manchester that some schools are struggling to provide staff for the numbers.
I really love these people who are happy to spend the government’s (ie the tax payer’s) money.
Probably the same group who would say “it doesn’t matter – its the company’s money”
Isn’t that the majority of mid to senior level employees, who routinely take the piss with expense accounts if allowed to?
Isn’t that the majority of mid to senior level employees, who routinely take the mick with expense accounts if allowed to?
Part of the deal about paying tax is that the government educates children – if that includes paying to educate children when schools are closed then that’s part of the government’s deal with the taxpayer.
No, people expect the government to use schools to do this. At no time has the public ever made a deal that would eliminate school buildings. Nor would the taxpayer ever agree that parents would willingly give up their employment to stay home because the government won’t use the buildings it used taxpayer funds to build to educate children.
Oh, how did we all know! The solution is to literally buy kids their own laptops, presumably out of my income tax, VAT, and various other government charges.
“Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to bring free broadband to everyone was mocked by the BBC as ‘broadband communism.’… It seems no-one is laughing now.”
I am, Kristina, I am.
I’m laughing too, in between banging my head on the table. ‘Digital poverty’ the latest buzz phrase that we all have to pay for. The only thing the gocvernment should do is stop pandering to the hysteria and left wing teaching unions and re-open the schools
As with the furlough scheme being paid to employers, not workers, the Government resists giving resources directly to the people who need them. To do so would imply that the needs of the less well off are not their own fault but the result of systemic inequality which the Government can address directly if it chooses to.
The govt has taken away resources from those who need them. That’s the net effect of lockdown mania. Shutting down schools does not just stifle education, it has social and psychological effects on children. And arbitrarily shutting businesses and putting millions into unemployment is not stopping a virus; it’s creating dependency.
The Uruguayan government provided every child in the country with a laptop and revolutionised education in a semi-rural second-world country. Surely a means-tested system to create and dish out a functioning laptop on means-tested basis would be the minimum we should be looking at, some will not be respected and some parents will not be interested but that is a bigger social question that shouldn’t stop a significant number of UK kids get access to basic 21st Century education facilities.