Children without access to the the technology or space to learn from home should attend school during the Covid lockdown, the government has said.
The Department for Education has been repeatedly accused of failing to properly provide for England’s poorest children during school shutdowns, with families left to share one laptop or phone between multiple children and escalating mobile data costs.
While schools remained officially open during the autumn term, hundreds of thousands of children were forced to self-isolate at home after outbreaks, with many of the most vulnerable pupils cut off almost entirely from their classes.
With the introduction of a full national lockdown on Monday, thousands more children face the same situation.
Amid longstanding allegations of pupils being unable to access even the devices they’d previously been promised by government, education secretary Gavin Williamson has been pressed throughout the crisis to explain what his department is doing to ensure all children can remain in education.
And as of January 5, the official government criteria for children who can continue attending school during lockdown now include: “Those who may have difficulty engaging with remote education at home (for example due to a lack of devices or quiet space to study).”
But leading charity the Child Poverty Action Group has already questioned the approach, saying the plan “trades off” access to school and safety.
A spokesperson said: “The DfE has said that kids without devices or quiet space to study can go into school during lockdown.
“This trades off education with health inequalities – without devices or data, these kids need to be in school, but this puts the health of their community at greater risk. Far better to take urgent action to equip all children to access the curriculum at home.”
Despite adding children without access to technology or space to the list of pupils allowed to attend schools, Williamson has insisted that the country is “much better prepared than last March” to implement home-learning.
He said: “We are now better prepared to deliver online learning. This is an important step forward in supporting children to make the progress with their education that they so desperately need, and we’ll also do what we can to help their parents.”
He added: “We have set out clear, legally binding requirements for schools to provide high-quality remote education. This is mandatory for all state-funded schools and will be enforced by Ofsted.
“We expect schools to provide between three and five hours’ teaching a day, depending on the child’s age. If parents feel their child’s school is not providing suitable remote education they should first raise their concerns with the teacher or headteacher and, failing that, report the matter to Ofsted.”
On laptops, he said: “We’ve purchased more than one million laptops and tablets and have already delivered over 560,000 of those to schools and local authorities with an extra 100,000 being distributed this week alone. By the end of next week, we will have delivered 750,000 devices.”