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Calling time on the digital divide
An interview with Valerie Thompson, Chief Executive, e-Learning Foundation
By Kim Thomas |
Valerie Thompson, Chief Executive of the e-Learning Foundation, says that her organisation's long-term goal is to "shut up shop because we've achieved our aim". That aim is no less than making sure that every schoolchild in the country has access, while out of school, to a computer.
The e-Learning Foundation was set up in 2001 to tackle the problem known as the 'digital divide', where some children have access to ICT out of school hours, and some children don't. Valerie's argument is simple: "While 75% of middle-class children get to university, only about 15% of lower income children do. We know that the difference isn't genetic and we know that they go to the same schools and follow the same curriculum and are taught by teachers who are trained in the same way, so the only thing that could be causing that massive differentiation in their educational future is home environment."
Historically, she goes on, schools have been unable to influence what happens in the home environment. The difference now is that ICT gives schools the ability to do just that - to reach into the lives of all their pupils and help them learn at home, just as middle-class children have always done. The mission to give all children ICT access at home is not, says Valerie, based so much on social justice as on "educational consistency": "This is a pedagogical issue. How can you embed ICT into teaching and learning in school when only half of the children can go home and carry on doing it? It makes no sense whatsoever."
For this reason, Valerie is unimpressed by schools that continue to invest in ICT suites which, she points out, are usually unavailable after school hours, or at weekends, or during the holidays, and which are often used by each class for only one or two hours a week for specialist ICT teaching. Portable devices, on the other hand, can be used in conjunction with interactive whiteboards and wireless networks to embed ICT right across the curriculum. And, of course, they can be taken home: "The important thing is that whatever has been taught during the day during ICT can continue to be used for the rest of the time that children are learning. All the statistics suggest that the difference in learning outcomes between poor and rich kids is the learning that happens outside the school, not what goes on inside school."
Valerie describes the e-Learning Foundation as a "learner-centric" charity. It works mainly through local e-learning foundations, which raise money to buy mobile devices, such as laptops, PDAs or tablet PCs. Usually, the local foundations are formed by a school or schools acting together and raising money from parents, local businesses or other sources in the local community. The national foundation also gives grants to local foundations in deprived areas, with the proviso that these grants must be spent on increasing individual home access to ICT for pupils; they cannot be spent on purchasing laptops for classroom use. The foundation also stipulates that access must be equitable - the equipment must go to all children, regardless of whether their parents have made a financial contribution.
Some contribution from parents, however, is essential to the scheme, as most schools cannot afford to spend huge amounts of money on ICT: "This isn't schools asking parents for more money to build a new building, or to pay for an extra teacher. We're asking parents to contribute to a scheme which allows the school to let the computers go home and be used not just by the child but by the family." In return, the schools generally offer free ICT courses, leading to qualifications such as the European Computer Driving Licence, to parents who are interested in learning basic computing skills.
To sceptics who argue that children cannot be trusted to take ICT equipment home, Valerie has a fairly robust response: "There are 99 reasons why schools can't help students have access at home. We're not interested in working with schools which are full of excuses." In practice, she points out, there have been few problems, and where parents are involved, the families want to take good care of equipment.
But do such schemes make a difference? Valerie points to research from Becta, the LSE and Lancaster University, all suggesting that home access makes a "significant" difference to educational outcomes. Those schools prepared to give children home access to ICT have found that it opens up new opportunities, she argues. Children are able to save lessons from an interactive whiteboard onto a laptop and review them at home before doing their homework, for example. Or they can dial into selected websites for research (if a family doesn't have internet access, they can obtain it through a free scheme run by AOL). In some schools, children do their written homework on the laptop and e-mail it to their teacher.
The schemes have been extremely successful, says Valerie, in engaging children who were previously uninterested in school: "Children who can't wait to get out of school at the end of the day are staying for another hour because they can use the internet and do curriculum-based work - they're not just fiddling about. No-one would have believed that of these children."
And as hoped, schools have seen parental involvement increase: "Schools are finding that when children take their computers home, parents are engaging with their children's learning in a way that they're not doing when they bring a textbook and exercise book home. Schools are seeing parents who they've never seen before. It's actually pulling parents out of the woodwork."
Valerie regards the introduction of home access to ICT as an issue of educational urgency, not something that can wait 10 or 20 years: "If the heads of this country have it in them, they can play an enormously powerful role in making sure this generation of children aren't disadvantaged because of the discrepancies in access to technology outside school. They can do something about it but only if they care enough and only if they take action. We will do everything we can to help them do that."
Links
e-Learning Foundation: www.e-learningfoundation.com
March 2005
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