The Digital Divide: Closing the achievement gap in the connected classroom

In partnership with Microsoft

by

4th December 2020

Just 1% of primary state schools provide devices that their pupils can take home, compared to 38% of private primary schools according to new survey data from Teacher Tapp featured in a new report published today by Microsoft in association with The Centre for Education and Youth.

As schools continue to flex and adjust to a second national lock down, this new data highlights the challenges faced in providing the new models of learning that education increasingly depends upon.

Today’s report shows that:

  • In the state sector just one in three teachers have access to 1-to-1 technologies, compared to two in three teachers in the private sector
  • 72% of students in schools rated inadequate by Ofsted do not have access to individual devices in their classrooms, compared to 59% in outstanding schools
  • Just 1% of primary state schools provide devices that their pupils can take home, compared to 38% of private primary schools.
  • At secondary level, 7% of secondary state schools provide take home devices, whilst 20% of private secondary schools do so.

Loic Menzies, Chief Exec at CfEY, who authored the report’s foreword said:

 “It is indefensible that it has taken a crisis of this scale to reveal the material barriers to learning that stand in pupils’ way. The need to act now could not be more urgent.”

Writing in Schools Week this morning he argues that:

“Given technology’s critical role in mitigating the impact of closures, 2020 looks set to become the year in which the digital divide took on critical importance for the education sector. ”

On Thursday, CfEY brought together a group of leading experts to discuss three key questions arising from the report:

  1. What is the problem that needs tackling?
  2. How has it evolved and changed over the course of the last 6-9 months?
  3. What do different stakeholders (government, corporate, schools and civil society) do about the issue in the immediate, and then longer term?

You can watch the discussion on CfEY’s YouTube channel

Download the full report and data here

 

 

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