How well did the Department of Education support schools and disadvantaged children in England?

On 23rd March 2020 as Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown for England due to the spread of COVID-19, school teaching had to move online and children had to complete their work from home via a computer, laptop or tablet.

As you can imagine for disadvantaged children, like young carers or those from low-income families, this was tough.

This issue was brought to our attention by a single-parent who’s child attends a large primary school in Manchester, she said: “At first my daughter had to use my mobile phone to do her home learning on, as we just didn’t have the money for a new laptop, I later called the schools to see if we could borrow a laptop but they explained that they had none left and there was a huge waiting list.”

She continued to explain how “helpless” she was and found herself feeling like she was “letting her daughter down.”

The government website claims that the Department of Education provided more than 1.3 million laptops and tablets to help disadvantaged pupils and young people with remote and face-to-face education during coronavirus (COVID-19). Yet there were still schools all over the country whose pupils were left struggling throughout the pandemic, missing out on hours of education.

We spoke to Sam Ashton, an ITT PE Teacher at a primary school Leeds, West Yorkshire. Sam gave us a detailed insight into the tough conditions some of her pupils faced during the multiple national lockdowns – not just with access to equipment for learning but also basic meals at home too.

Sam explained: “Online learning was a struggle for us as teachers and pupils. I found that pupils were often less engaging and less likely to complete work that was set for them, which was hard to change due to not being able to sanction them as a teacher due to them not being in school.”

“Attendance was extremely poor, compared to when schools are open.”

“Only 70% of pupils attended online lessons at the beginning, but if the engagement rate was taken, I expect this percentage to drop dramatically below half this.”

Before the pandemic the school Sam is employed at in Leeds had access to a very small number of laptops around four / five classes would share around twenty laptops between them.

“We had around 60-70 pupils in lockdown who were disadvantaged or a child of a key worker, these pupils were allowed to be in school to use the school computers to access their learning and be taken care of by teachers and pastoral care.”

“There was also a large number of pupils who were disadvantaged without the access to a laptop and WIFI, and also regular meals.”

Sam continued to tell us: “Very few of the laptops were funded by schemes, this was due to how long the wait was for the government to contact and grant funding for what was applied for.”

“A large proportion of the laptops we used were donated to the school by local businesses who did not need the laptops anymore due to upgrading this was such a huge help to us.”

“Through handing out laptops from the school classrooms and from donations all pupils at a disadvantage were catered for to ensure that they could continue their learning… often teachers would nominate themselves during their free time to deliver laptops/wifi usb’s/food parcels.”

“Sources did become extremely limited and so the school reached out to all its contacts to ensure every child was provided for. We worked beyond our usual working hours to do what we could for every pupil.”

As disadvantaged children were allowed to return back to school to complete learning during the second and third lockdown, Sam explained how this was very little help to the situation:

“For vulnerable pupils this was often worse as a majority of this groups need extra support in their lessons (1-1 support) online learning meant this was unable to happen for them due to it not being private and so they were really disadvantaged. Many did not know exactly how to set up and use the laptops and their programmes and so their learning did not grow" Sam concluded.

We also spoke to Matt from the ‘Who Cares Campaign’ he explained to us that a lot of disadvantaged children aren’t always identified within the community, especially young carers who the campaign work hard to support within communities. The Who Cares Campaign was founded in 2019, ran by Lung Theatre Company, Goddum Centre and the Lowry Theatre and based in mainly based in areas in and around Salford but now also connections with young carer services all over the UK including North Wales, Cheshire West, Folkston and Kent. The Who Cares Campaign was first set up to help identify more young carers in and around the UK and offer them long-term support.

Matt told us that because 70% of young carers are unidentified and do not receive support, they are entitled to so the Who Cares Campaign have taken at huge focus on raising awareness of ‘hidden carers’ over the past year.

He's said: “At the Who Cares Campaign we have been really busy during the lockdown we did some work with Salford primary care together… we worked with them to do some Q&A’s with GP’s about caring for a loved one during COVID and we also created a COVID-19 hotline for young carers to use during the pandemic if they needed access to PPE…”

The Who Cares Campaign set up another campaign called the ‘Digi-Fund’ which was created to raise funds to provide young carers with the digital devices they needed to complete school work and help them in managing their responsibilities as a young carer.

“These devices would be used by carers to do anything from booking appointments to managing prescriptions online.”

“The fund was also used to provide mobile phones to children as they went back to school, so they were able to check up their loved ones from school throughout the day.” Matt continued.

The Who Cares team were able to raise just over £5000 from the Digi-Fund.

“We were over the moon that we were able to hit our target and very thankful that again people around the UK real dug deep in such a difficult time and came out to support young carers – very touched and humbled by the public appeal.”

One in three young carers are from low-income families and the average young carer misses out on 48 days of school a year. Young carers also face huge risk of social exclusion whilst growing up.

Matt said: “We wanted to support young carers to get access to these devices because it will make such a huge difference to their life chances out of the pandemic but also means that they are able to care for a loved one even as we are still now trying to navigate COVID.”

“These devices have allowed children to stay connected with friends, as young carers often miss out on a lot of social events growing up due to the responsibilities they have at home.”

“We have all experienced feelings of loneliness during the pandemic and having these devices has made catching up with friends so much easier and by giving young carers these devices it means they will feel a lot less isolated and be able to stay in touch better – this is so important.”

Matt also explained how a lot of young people they have worked with have not expressed how tough it has been to work from home, especially if the device they are using is broken or it has been shared between multiple siblings.

“I think schools in general have really struggled during the pandemic, there has been such a huge disruption to education and that’s why our Digi-Fund is really important because we really want to make sure young carers when they come back into the normal world, they’ve got all of the devices they need to flourish. Young carers deserve to be on an equal level playing field to everyone else in their classroom.” Matt concluded.

After speaking to Matt, we then decided to take this investigation further by sending out a survey to schools around the England to see how things ran for them. The results show that the majority of schools who completed this survey struggled massively to provide all children with laptops for home learning especially during the first national lockdown. Results also show that few schools have benefitted from government schemes to help provide laptops and tablets to pupils and those who have benefited faced a huge delay - some didn't even receive support until early 2021.