Fixing the Digital Divide

Children without internet access are left behind from an early age. But you can avoid read / write errors by getting every pupil online, finds Lloyd Burgess...

While we refer to emails, ebooks and e-learning to differentiate from their ‘old-fashioned’ equivalents, the line between them has been very much blurred. Schools are connected across the globe, children are coding and e-safety is regularly taught. But in this digital age, what happens to those who are left off the grid?

The Department for Education has shown the link between poverty and achievement in schools (tinyurl.com/TPGap), and with technology becoming ever more present in education, there is a real risk that children without internet access will only fall further behind. Almost half a million school-age children in the UK still cannot go online at home, and those children are therefore not getting the same education as their peers. Thankfully, getting every child connected shouldn’t be too difficult.

The Mind the Gap (mindthegap.org.uk) campaign has been launched by the e-Learning Foundation (e-learningfoundation.com), and will support schools to provide internet access to families. “It’s is about getting the last small, but significant, number of disadvantaged children online at home,” says Valerie Thompson, Chief Executive of e-Learning Foundation.“The attainment gap is very much a poverty measure, and of the 485,000 children who can’t go online, the majority come from the lowest-income families.”

But how do you get internet access to a family who are always on the move, or who won’t pass any sort of credit check for a contract? “One of the answers is a MiFi unit,” says Valerie. “They cost around £24, you plug it into the socket, put a sim card in it, and up to five members of that family are immediately connected to the internet.” Look around for pay-as-you-go options as there are many price plans available. You can also get special deals such as BT Basic, which offers line rental and broadband for around £10 per month for anyone receiving benefits such as income support or Jobseeker’s Allowance. See tinyurl.com/TPbroadbandBT for full details.

One school which has already found similar solutions for its families is St Joseph’s RC Primary School in Goole, North Humberside. This is the first school in the UK to receive a £500 prize from the e-Learning Foundation for being recognised as digitally inclusive. Headteacher Tina Berry understood the importance of discretion and sensitivity in helping every family get online. “We approached people individually, so their business remained private,” she explains. “We stood outside the school every morning and carried out some questionnaires. There were five families who didn’t have internet access, and we offered to provide them with the Mi-Fi units. Thankfully, they all took up the offer, and we’ve had lots of positive feedback from both pupils and parents who are very appreciative.”

Teachers now have greater flexibility in setting homework, knowing every child is online. “Now, at the start of a block of a few weeks we give children the opportunity to choose a project linked to their curriculum,” says Tina. “They work independently using research skills to provide something in their own unique learning style and present it to the other children. You can feel the excitement in the air. They are so proud.”

It’s also opened up new possibilities for the school going forward. Goole is a relatively young town that’s somewhat isolated. “Digital inclusion means the people here have been able to access things from a much wider area than before,” says Tina. “We’re hoping this can upskill children and parents, and subsequently increase their job prospects. We’re planning to build a community learning hub on school grounds where children can go to look at storytelling and where their imaginations can run riot. We’ve even become an ambassador school for the Fujitsu education programme; we’re hoping to create a state-of-the-art learning environment that can also be used by the community for events like parenting classes, social gatherings and debt management.”

St Joseph’s is a great example of what can be achieved through eradicating the digital divide in schools, and of why doing so is so important. “If children are struggling to develop these skills when they’re small, by the time they get to secondary school it will only get worse,” says Valerie. “Then the attainment gap stats between GCSE and A Level results show a significant margin between children eligible for free school meals and the rest. Being poor isn’t something that is easy to academically overcome. We don’t think any child should be at school in the 21st century and not have access to all the resources that children are expected to have. We owe it to these children to give them the same opportunities as all the other kids.”