Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 7 October 2020 to Question 96748, what recent estimate he has made of the number of disadvantaged (a) primary and (b) secondary school children (i) with and (ii) still without access to appropriate information technology equipment in their homes; and if he will make a statement.

The Government wants to do everything it can to support schools to deliver remote education. The Department has invested over £195 million to support remote education and access to online social care, delivering over 220,000 laptops and tablets during the summer term for disadvantaged children who would not otherwise have access to a digital device.

The Department is adding to this support by making over 340,000 additional laptops and tablets available to support disadvantaged children that might face disruption to their education. Since September over 100,000 of these have been delivered to schools.

The Department has allocated a number of devices to each school. To arrive at this allocation, the Department used data on the number of pupils eligible for free school meals in each school. The Department expects that pupils’ device needs will be met to some extent by the device endowments of schools and colleges. The Department has used the British Educational Suppliers Association ICT 2019 survey data on the average number of laptops and tablets in primary and secondary schools.

Schools, local authorities and academy trusts are able to request additional devices if their original allocation from the Department does not meet their needs.