Remote Education: Feltham and Heston

(asked on 19th January 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how may requests for (a) laptops and (b) broadband access he has received from each school in Feltham and Heston constituency; and how many (i) laptops and (ii) connectivity solutions he has provided to each of those schools.


Answered by
Nick Gibb Portrait
Nick Gibb
This question was answered on 25th January 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 18 January, over 800,000 laptops and tablets had been delivered to state schools, academy trusts and local authorities.

Figures on requests for, and delivery of, devices by constituency are not available.

More information on the number of devices delivered can viewed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/laptops-tablets-and-4g-wireless-routers-progress-data. We will be publishing updated data on a weekly basis.

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.

We have also 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.

We are grateful to EE, O2, Sky Mobile, Smarty, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Mobile, and Vodafone for their collaboration. We continue to invite a range of mobile network providers to support the offer.

All four major mobile network operators - Vodafone, O2, Three and EE - have also committed to working together to make access to Oak National Academy free for school children. Additionally, BT and EE are making access to BBC Bitesize resources free from the end of January 2021.

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