Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to harness digital technology to deliver educational services.

The Government is working with the education sector as well as researchers and the education technology industry to target the key challenges and highlight the opportunities that technology presents to empower teachers, leaders and providers to make better-informed decisions about the use of technology across education.

Tackling specific challenges, we recently announced a £7.7 million curriculum fund to encourage the development of high quality and knowledge-rich teaching resources. These resources, which could include digital as well as traditional materials, will help teachers deliver the government’s new curriculum while reducing workload and giving them more time to focus on teaching.

We are also investing £84 million of new funding over the next five years to deliver a comprehensive programme to improve the teaching of computing and drive up participation in computer science, particularly amongst girls.

At the last budget, we announced a £30 million National Retraining Scheme fund to deliver digital skills training using edtech and artificial intelligence so that students and trainees can benefit from this emerging technology, wherever they are in the country.