Education Settings: Autumn Opening

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker]

The noble Lord, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, has withdrawn his name, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, will my noble friend join me in sincerely thanking all those teachers who have worked, many of them solidly since the February half-term, through the Easter holidays, not least to teach the children of front-line workers and those with special needs? On the subject of laptops, of those 230,000 how many have actually been delivered and how many are being effectively used right now by students?

[Baroness Berridge]

Of course I join the noble Lord in paying tribute to the extraordinary effort by teachers, support staff and school business leaders at the moment in offering education. Over 200,000 of the laptops were delivered on target by the end of June, so the commitment that we made has been delivered. As I say, we have a slight surplus so that we can deal with any further orders that we get and can have a certain degree of flexibility in future. However, we have to trust the schools. The department cannot issue these laptops to individual children; we have given them to local authorities and therefore to schools and multi-academy trusts. They know the students who need them, and we trust them as professionals to have distributed them properly.