The Missing Million: Bridging the Digital Divide

Jon Barr

School leader Jon Barr, whose primary last month won an award for its coronavirus response, discusses technology shortages

A groundswell of parental disquiet has emerged as the 2021 lockdown has extended from weeks into months. Underneath those struggling with the demands of their children’s schools, responding to the Department for Education guidelines that children and young people should be offered a daily diet of between 3 to 5 hours learning, lies another challenge. There are those who have been unable to access any kind of online learning since the pandemic initiated the March 2020 lockdown. In the spring of 2020 educators, such as Dr Dan Nichols in his blog post Urgent Attention Needed, cited the digital divide as education priority number two, behind ensuing that every child across the country was fed term time or during holidays.

The Covid-19 crisis is often framed in numbers, such as the current vogue for tracking vaccinations, whether Pfizer or AstraZeneca, or the sobering daily death rate which throughout January was stubbornly above 1,000 each day, despite the restrictions of lockdown and the return to 80% of England’s children and young people learning in their homes. For the Department for Education, the response to the digital divide being visible has been about quoting the numbers of laptops that have been distributed through schools and local authorities.

The initial promise in 2020 was that government would distribute over 500,000 laptops to the most disadvantaged in the country. The figure of 9% of households in the United Kingdom having inadequate technology or Wi-Fi access was much quoted. Initially this made the half a million target seem entirely reasonable until it became apparent that the total number of children and young people needing connectivity and technology was anything up to 1.8 million.   The Department for Education’s ambition was therefore reasonable only if we discount the consequent estimate that that would leave 1.3 million children and young people without access.  The admittedly outstanding response of the education technology sector, whether that be BETT 2021 COVID-19 Response Champions White Rose Maths, BBC Bitesize or the teacher-led Oak Academy, heightened the sense that yet again the pandemic was heightening inequalities.