IF WE DON’T ACT NOW, WE WILL FAIL A GENERATION
Businesses, shops, hospitals and even churches have all moved online during the pandemic. But a year on, as many as 400,000 children continue to lose out, with no laptops or computers at all.
shockingly, nearly 2 million children have had no internet access during this crisis, as their parents could not afford it. That means one in five children has been unable to connect to online lessons.
Today Britain stands tall for having developed and then injected vaccines into the arms of millions. But we are still far behind in the more basic task of getting computers into the hands of the children who need them most.
it took the threat of court action last year – and a powerful Daily Mail campaign – to get the Department of education to commit £85 million for more than 200,000 laptops and nearly 50,000 Wi-fi routers. But even now, education ministers don’t know how many devices are still required, let alone have a workable plan to supply them.
in the most deprived schools, up to 20 per cent of children lack devices, compared to just 3 per cent at private schools. Thousands of parents are often forced to choose between internet access and food.
Quite simply, we need a change of policy. All educational courses – and not just the BBC and the online classroom Oak national Academy – should be transmitted free over the internet, as we have done with NHS services thanks to an agreement with internet providers.
LET’S also reduce charges for those parents who are too poor to pay in full. Ofcom has mandated that two providers, BT and KCOM, implement social tariffs. But these tariffs are not automatic or even easy to secure: people applying for BT Basic need to call a phone number, wait for a form to be sent and then, having filled it in, wait for up to another 30 days before learning if their application has been successful.
Virgin Media and Hyperoptic have voluntarily implemented ‘social tariffs’, but these have different eligibility criteria, adding to the confusion. Ofcom should work with Government to agree that all parents on universal Credit are eligible, and make this an obligation on the internet providers.
But people have to be connected in the first place.
The Good Things Foundation has called for a £130 million investment in skills to get at least 4.8 million more people online. We need a robust national plan to get disadvantaged children the devices and catch-up tuition they need. The sutton Trust estimates this will cost £ 750 million. But can we afford not to pay?
The jobs of the future demand digital skills: putting these on the same footing as literacy and numeracy targets in the national curriculum is the way to futureproof our children against further damage to their education.
A failure to act now will not only fail a generation. it will hurt us all, depriving us of the workforce our country needs. Gordon Brown was the Prime
Minister from 2007 to 2010