Educational Settings: Reopening Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Education
Siobhain McDonagh
Main Page: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)Department Debates - View all Siobhain McDonagh's debates with the Department for Education
Educational Settings: Reopening
Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Nick Gibb
I certainly join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to teachers in Cheadle. Combining teaching vulnerable children and critical workers’ children full time in school with providing high-quality remote education to pupils at home is a huge challenge. Of course, teachers also have to maintain the safety measures that are in place to ensure that we minimise the risk of transmission in school. I am aware of the very real challenges that teachers face. Ensuring that children who have not coped as well with remote education as they would in the class are able to catch up as swiftly as possible when they return to school is a key priority for the Department, and we will be saying more about that in the weeks ahead.
Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)
Schools need a return plan, but what about the children who are unable to learn remotely in the meantime? The Government are slowly distributing laptops that are unusable without connectivity, but 1 million children have only mum’s mobile as their connection and a further half a million have no connection at all and so cannot receive network data boosts. Nine months on, why has the Minister still not ensured that those children can connect from home so that they do not fall even further behind?
Nick Gibb
If I am allowed, I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for her assiduous work on remote education. We have purchased 1.3 million computers for children and young people in our schools and colleges at a time when there is huge global demand for those devices. They have been built to order, imported, shipped and distributed, and 876,000 of them are now in the hands of schools and pupils. It is also right to point to data. We have partnered with the UK’s major mobile phone operators to provide free data to disadvantaged children so that they can get online using, for example, their parents’ smartphone. They will not have to pay data charges for downloading educational material.