Secondary Education: Remote Education

(asked on 4th November 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate his Department has made of the number of students of secondary school age who would be, due to lack of access to technology, unable to engage in remote learning in (a) Leeds East constituency, (b) Leeds (c) Yorkshire and the Humber and (d) nationwide.


Answered by
Nick Gibb Portrait
Nick Gibb
This question was answered on 9th November 2020

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 children that might face disruption to their education. Since September 2020, over 100,000 of these have been delivered to schools.

The Department allocated a number of devices to each school based on how many devices they would need if the school closed fully. To arrive at this allocation, the Department used data on the number of pupils eligible for free school meals in each school along with an estimate of the number of devices the school already owns.

Attendance data suggests most schools are not closing fully, and are instead supporting small groups of children that are not able to attend school because they are self-isolating. The Department changed the number of devices allocated to each school to reflect this, because original allocations were based on a school’s total need should they fully close.

This more targeted approach to allocations mean as many schools and disadvantaged children as possible benefit from receiving a device in the event that their face-to-face education is disrupted.

Reticulating Splines