Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many (a) laptops and (b) home learning devices have been distributed to children in (i) England, (ii) the West Midlands and (iii) the Meriden constituency to support access to education during the covid-19 outbreak.

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.

As of Monday 25 January, over 870,000 laptops and tablets had been delivered to schools, trusts and local authorities across England, who are responsible for distributing them onward to disadvantaged children and families.

Figures on the number of devices delivered, broken down by local authority and academy trust are available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/laptops-and-tablets-data.

All schools, academy trusts and local authorities have now been given the opportunity to order devices. Laptops and tablets are owned by schools, trusts or local authorities to lend to children and young people who need them most during the current COVID-19 restrictions.

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 2021, we announced that we will be providing a further 300,000 devices over the course of this term.

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 for their collaboration. 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.