Thousands of students are to get free laptops in a move to help bridge the digital divide while schools are closed.

Education Minister Joe McHugh has announced a €10m fund targeted at disadvantaged pupils in both primary and post primary schools .

Most of the focus is on Leaving Cert students, with €7m of the money going to post-primary schools with a view to supporting the 6th year exam candidates.

One estimate suggests that up to 10,000 of the 61,000 Leaving Cert students nationwide may be in need of a device to support their learning at home. Students may have mobile phones, but they do not lend themselves to teaching and learning in the same way as laptop or tablet.

Schools in the Department of Education’s DEIS scheme for disadvantaged communities will get additional funding.

A typical big post-primary school, with a minimum of 750 pupils, will receive a grant of €17,000, while a DIES school of the same size will receive €19,000. Fee-charging schools will not receive funding.

It will be up to schools to identify students in need and the device will be on loan to students and will remain he property of the school.

Schools may source their own devices, with advice from the Department of Education, if necessary, and, if the demand is there, the Department will get involved in a bulk order

A technology gap has emerged as one of the biggest challenges in ensuring equity between students as the school shutdown continues.

It is particularly critical for leaving Cert candidates, facing into a high stakes exam, which brings on its own stresses without the additional worry of lacking tools to complete their studies that more advantaged students enjoy.

The nationwide closure of schools has seen a widespread move to virtual classrooms but there are wide variations in schools’ capacity to deliver online teaching and learning.

The problem ranges from lack of broadband connectivity, a particular issue for student and teachers in rural areas, lack of digital devices and teachers’ own digital skills.

After the schools’ shutdown, Michelle O’Kelly, principal of the Mercy Secondary School, Inchicore, Dublin, a DEIS school discovered that none of her 26 Leaving Cert candidates had a laptop at home.

“As ready as we were for that challenge , I also knew that that our students were not only on an unequal playing field now because of their DEIS status but also because the digital divide would become compounded and concentrated as we tried to connect with our students in their homes.

“Very quickly into our first week using Google classroom we witnessed this divide, Leaving Cert students were not logging on as we rang each home the reason was very clear, our students homes do not have laptops , WiFi or space to study,” she said.

Up until today’s announcement, school like Mercy Secondary were in a race against time relying on ad-hoc initiatives by charitable and voluntary organisations to secure laptops.

The €10m is being diverted from a find announced in January, under the Digital Strategy in Schools, to support investment in ICT infrastructure .

Some €40m of that is already committed and the €10m was originally earmarked to support the embedding of excellent practice in digital teaching and learning.

Online Editors