Baroness Greengross
Main Page: Baroness Greengross (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Greengross's debates with the Department for Education
(2 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberI am pleased to update the House that, this morning, we announced our response to the Children Not in School consultation and have confirmed that we will be setting up a register of home-schooled children.
During the pandemic schools were provided with laptops to support students during the national lockdown and any future school closures. These laptops were delivered without software, anticipating that schools would need to install the programmes applicable to their own school context. However, in some cases, these devices still have not been used, as this added to the already stretched capacities of existing IT staff, who did not have the additional hours needed to install software or set up the laptops sufficiently. Do the Government have any information about how widespread this problem was and how many laptops remain unused?
The laptops that were distributed in the department’s Get Help with Technology programme are owned by the schools, trusts, local authorities and further education institutions concerned. It is those institutions which are responsible for making sure that they are safe and secure. We are offering support to those organisations to take urgent action to reset devices and to apply their own safeguarding measures, and we are making grant funding available to them to contribute to the technical support costs to which the noble Baroness refers.