On my mind With

“FACE to face” sounds like some new, inspirational teaching strategy designed to revolutionise the classrooms of Wales. Yet this essential aspect of learning and teaching still remains a distant hope as schools in Wales move again to online learning, and in that move is exposed another indicator of disadvantage – the digital divide.

It’s true that children’s digital skills often leave the rest of us with twitching fingers and a headache. After all, most older people only open Windows when it gets a bit stuffy. But it’s not much use being a digital whiz kid with no access to a laptop or when your connection rarely gets you beyond the Terms and Conditions.

An independent report published in October praised the Welsh Government for its speed, compared to the other UK nations, in responding to the challenge of supporting home learning during the pandemic by its provision of laptops and internet routers for disadvantaged learners. You may get confused with your ‘Mifi’, ‘Wifi’ and ‘Dongles’, but the Welsh Government continues to enable local authorities to engage with their schools in identifying those ‘digitally excluded’ learners.

However, there are still too many families without access to an appropriate digital device, often with means testing on the flawed ‘free schools meals’ criterion. There is a lot more work to be done in identifying digital disadvantage to allow all children to access online learning. It’s not surprising that when it comes to home learning on an Xbox, FIFA 21 will always get the highest score.

Labour’s promise in 2019 of free publicly owned broadband was ridiculed by the shortsighted media as ‘broadband communism’. Now that is the very thing we need. Here’s a chance for the Welsh Government’s operating system to prove they are not lacking in fibre and show some byte.