RED BOX | ESTHER MCVEY
We must improve access to online learning or thousands of children will be left behind
Esther McVey
Tuesday January 19 2021, 12.01am, The Times
The country is again enduring another national lockdown. Covid-19 is a harmful disease and we should do everything we can to minimise its spread, but there is one group of people we don’t hear enough about at the moment, and they are suffering terribly: school children.
They are the pandemic’s forgotten victims. Millions of children are stuck at home with school closures destroying their education, damaging their prospects and impacting their health and welfare.
It’s easy for people in Westminster to forget that the only reason they have the privilege of being in parliament is because they had the advantage of an education. Yet this is precisely the thing we’re depriving today’s young people of.
It’s unethical to shut down schools with no full-time alternatives at the ready. Yet 1.78 million children still don’t have access to devices for online lessons, according to Ofcom. Nearly 200,000 children in the UK have almost no internet connectivity at home, and almost a quarter of children from the poorest families have no home access to broadband.
Every hour of lost teaching is a tragedy so it’s vital that all students and teachers get the equipment, training and coverage they need to get the job done from home. These pupils need devices, a proper online curriculum, and technology and training in schools that enable oversight and support for pupils as well as a feedback loop between pupils and teachers. And the government needs to reinstate its manifesto pledge of 1 gigabit capability to everyone by 2025 so pupils — regardless of where they live — have a reliable internet connection.
If these standards aren’t met, the educational divide will continue to deepen day by day and this generation of political leaders and educationalists will fail our children in a way not seen since before 1870, when the principle of universal education was born. We must not leave children and their parents languishing like this.
The government has taken steps to provide laptops as well as internet and mobile access, and worked with independent education providers such as Oak Academy, BrainPop, Creative Bug and the BBC — but it is far from comprehensive. Sutton Trust’s recent survey found that only one in ten teachers reported that their pupils had adequate access to both devices and the internet.
What really worries me is that the schools shutdown is not only leading to falling educational standards for all children, but exacerbating social divisions that already existed before Covid-19 — leaving our country’s most vulnerable children far behind.
The educational divide between the haves and the have-nots is “widening by the day” according to the Social Mobility Commission, Unesco says that the schools shutdown is “particularly severe for the most vulnerable” and the children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, cautioned that “the education divide is broadening” and that we risk losing “almost a decade of catching up on that education gap”.
Businesses such as Netflix, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other online services have adapted to cater for their customers and upgraded their capability to cope with the surge in demand for their services. Why can’t the education establishment and the government act and adapt with just as much agility on behalf of schools and their pupils?
If we seize this moment and get online education right, it could become an exceptional resource with wider uses, like allowing children to catch up if they’ve been off ill and help cater for the children being taught at home — and it could even support children who have the capability to surge ahead in a subject.
The best way of levelling up educational opportunities and closing the widening educational divide between disadvantaged children and their peers is of course to reopen schools. But if the government chooses not to, and if unions and local councils are arguing for schools to remain shut, then they must take joint responsibility to work together to set out a new school online education standard and to make provision for a full, accessible education online.
Education is not optional. It is an essential service just like healthcare and the provision of food. There can be no greater cause than uniting for the sake of our country’s children and protecting their futures. So it’s time to get schools open or reform the way lessons are delivered at home so that we don’t let down a whole generation of children.
Esther McVey is a Conservative MP and former cabinet minister
