Schools have welcomed the news that the Department for Education has pledged £150 million to ensure every school in the country will access high-speed internet by 2025.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi announced the pledge this week, stating that ‘this new investment moves us a giant step forward to ensure that every school across the country has the best technology’, with the fund aiming to support those schools who need an upgrade of their broadband connection the most.
Areas, such as those listed in the Department for Education’s Levelling Up white paper last month – including County Durham, Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, South Tyneside and Sunderland – will be contacted by the DfE over the next three years, as ‘priority areas’ and will be assisted in facilitating faster and more reliable connectivity.
Mr Zahawi addressed Covid in his announcement and noted the unfair way in which technology could be easily accessed by some schools, but not by others, saying ‘we need to use our experience from the pandemic as a springboard to embed new and better ways of using technology in schools, and across education’, as the Department for Education released its first set of digital and technology standards for schools.
The news of access to high-speed internet for every school has been welcomed by those remembering how schools and students struggled with technological issues throughout the pandemic, as well as those looking to the future. General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, Geoff Barton said it was ‘important to seize opportunities offered by technology to enhance the learning experience of young people’, while Caroline Wright, Director General of the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), stated that she was glad that the Department for Education will ‘provide digital guidance to better help schools understand the baseline infrastructure that is needed to start addressing the digital divide in our schools.’
This digital divide has been a focus of Schools North East since long before the pandemic began, with one of the recommendations in our ‘Manifesto for NE Education’ being to ‘Ensure all pupils can access an appropriate curriculum.’ While Mr Zahawi’s latest announcements are to be welcomed, it is also necessary for the Government to ensure that every school is treated equally, particularly with his keenness to explore the potential of online exams.
One thing that pandemic has showed us, as a region, is that many children struggled to cope with gaining significant online access at home and that this still needs to be mitigated in order to give the young people of this region a fair chance of sufficiently preparing themselves for potential online assessments.
In the Schools North East ‘State of the Region’ survey in January 2021, as the country was plunged into lockdown once more, just over 40% of the NE school leaders surveyed reported issues around internet access, while just over 50% reported issues around devices. Furthermore, two-thirds of respondents were concerned that the digital divide would exacerbate the impact of learning loss in their schools.
At the time this survey was carried out, many homes were sharing electronic devices, with both parents and children requiring them to work, while intermittent broadband, as has been addressed in the Department for Education’s latest announcement re schools, made it all the more difficult for learners to gain access to their work.
As well as students being unable to access broadband at home, the issue of parental engagement was also raised, with more than two-thirds of respondents citing this as their most common concern. As many parents in the North East will simply not know how to help their children with online tasks, the need for this to be mitigated is hugely important.
This was highlighted further by the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, whose September 2021 report stated that the region is ‘one of the worst affected in the UK’ by the Digital Divide, with 70% of those surveyed saying they tend not to use the internet because they don’t know how or because they ‘do not have the skills to do so’.
The announcement that £150 million to get high speed internet to all schools by 2025 is a huge step forward for the children in the areas identified and time will tell as to whether it sufficiently mitigates the digital divide experienced by so many students and schools across the NE.
