Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of giving every school pupil at each Key Stage access to a laptop or desktop IT device and broadband for the future delivery of education.

The Government is investing over £400 million to support access to remote education and online social care services, by securing 1.3 million laptops and tablets for disadvantaged children and young people. This includes over 870,000 laptops and tablets that were delivered to schools, trusts and local authorities by 25 January.

The number of devices available to each school, trust and local authority is determined by their number of children eligible for Free School Meals. All schools, trusts and local authorities have now been given the opportunity to order their full current allocation of devices.

The Government is providing this significant injection of devices on top of an estimated 2.9 million laptops and tablets already owned by schools before the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. On 12 January, we announced that we will be providing a further 300,000 devices over the course of this term.

Figures on the number of devices delivered is available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/laptops-and-tablets-data/2021-week-4. These figures are broken down by Local Authority and Academy Trust. Figures on delivery by constituency are not available.

The Get Help with Technology scheme will enable schools to support disadvantaged children in years 3-11 and aged 16-19 who do not have access to a laptop or tablet privately or through school. In the context of unprecedented global demand for laptops and tablets, the year groups were set following conversations with school leaders and on the basis that children in younger years would be unlikely to be working on a laptop or tablet independently.

Where pupils experience barriers to digital remote education, we expect schools to offer different forms of remote education such as printed resources or textbooks. This should be supplemented with other forms of communication to keep pupils on track or answer questions about work.

We have also partnered with the UK’s leading mobile operators to provide free data for the academic year to help disadvantaged children get online. We are grateful to EE, O2, Smarty, Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Mobile, and Vodafone. We continue to invite a range of mobile network providers to support the offer. We have also delivered 54,000 4G wireless routers for pupil and care leavers without connection at home.