Remote Education: ICT

(asked on 28th January 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate he has made of the number of digital devices made available for primary school children who are learning at home in (a) Kingston upon Hull North, (b) Hull City, (c) Yorkshire and the Humber and (d) nationally.


Answered by
Nick Gibb Portrait
Nick Gibb
This question was answered on 10th February 2021

The Government is investing over £400 million to support access to remote education and online social care services, including securing 1.3 million laptops and tablets for disadvantaged children and young people.

As of Monday 8 February 2021, this includes over 980,000 laptops and tablets that were delivered to schools, academy trusts and local authorities.

Laptops and tablets are owned by schools, academy trusts or local authorities, who can lend these 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.

Figures on the number of devices already delivered are available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/laptops-and-tablets-data. This includes 1,749 delivered to the City of Hull local authority. The Department have also delivered devices to academy trusts, including schools in Yorkshire and the Humber, which are not included in this figure.

Regional figures for delivery of devices are currently not available for the period requested and figures by Parliamentary constituency are also not available.

Where schools need additional devices to support disadvantaged children, they should contact the Department for Education’s service team at covid.technology@education.gov.uk. They should include the number of pupils in Years 3 to 13 who require support and an explanation of how they have gathered this evidence.

To support access to the internet, the Department have partnered with the UK’s leading mobile operators to provide free data to help disadvantaged children get online, as well as delivering 4G wireless routers for pupils without connection at home. The Department are grateful to EE, O2, Sky Mobile, Smarty, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Mobile, Vodafone, BT Mobile and Lycamobile for their collaboration. We are currently engaged with additional mobile network operators and continue to invite a range of mobile network providers to support the offer.

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