Lack of tech means kids study late into night

HEADTEACHERS EXPRESS CONCERNS OVER LAPTOPS

SOME North East children are forced to study well into the night because they must share a laptop with parents working from home in the day, ministers have been warned.

Washington and Sunderland West MP Sharon Hodgson told the House of Commons that local head teachers had expressed concern about the failure to provide laptops or devices such as tablets to every child in need.

She was one of a number of MPs to call on the Government to guarantee every pupil has resources to learn from home.

Our website ChronicleLive has launched a Laptops for Kids scheme, in partnership with Northumbrian Water, the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and Sunderland-based IT firms Rebuyer and

Code, to help North East children learn during lockdown. More than 700 unused laptops and tablets have been pledged so far.

The House of Commons voted for a motion urging ministers to set a deadline for achieving this, and to give Parliament a weekly update on progress. Conservative MPs abstained on the vote, allowing the motion to pass with votes from Labour and other opposition MPs.

The Government has spent £400m on efforts to ensure every pupil can learn from home while schools are partially closed during the national lockdown, and to ensure pupils can continue learning if they are forced to self-isolate once schools have re-opened.

It says it has distributed 700,000 laptops and tablets for pupils from lower-income families who do not have access to this equipment.

But Ms Hodgson told ministers that children in her constituency didn’t have the equipment they needed.

She said: “On Friday, I met head teachers in my constituency who told me of children working well into the night because their parents had to use the only laptop in the house for work during the day.

“In other homes, children are expected to share a device with five siblings. How can we hope for our young people to develop when we feed them poorly and force them to learn on one sixth of a shared computer with limited data access?”

Sunderland Central MP Julie Elliott said that children from lowerincome families had been disadvantaged for a long time because they were less likely to have digital equipment at home, but the coronavirus pandemic had made the problem more obvious.

She said: “The digital divide and the impact it is having on people’s lives was known about before the pandemic. It meant that people struggled to access services and information, and to engage with the digital world around them.

“When the pandemic arrived, it forced everyone indoors and into a digital world. It shone a light on the digital inequalities that already existed and, as time went on, exacerbated them.”

She said: “The Department for Education might say that it is going to provide one million devices, but that is not good enough. The actual digital divide, according to Ofcom, means 1.8 million people not having adequate connectivity.”

Schools Minister Nick Gibb told the Commons: “It is crucial that all children continue to learn during the lockdown, so we have updated the remote education guidance for schools to clarify and strengthen expectations, drawing on our evolving understanding of best practice in remote education.

“The Government are spending £400m on remote education to help schools and colleges meet those expectations. That includes three quarters of a million laptops and tablets that have already been delivered to schools and local authorities since the start of the pandemic.” Anyone wanting to support the Laptops for Kids campaign should visit www.donatedigital. co.uk where businesses can pledge to donate suitable technology, individuals can express interest in donating items and head teachers can request help.