The councillor in charge of education on the Isle of Wight Council has rebutted claims only 400 laptops have been given out to Island children.
Councillor Julie Jones Evans told a council scrutiny meeting she was concerned the number was not enough to meet the needs of 7,000 children deemed to be in poverty on the Island.
But the council’s cabinet member for education, Cllr Paul Brading, has said the number of laptops handed out and in the process of being given out is almost quadruple that. He said:
“We as a council have been working very closely with our schools to develop programmes to help learners respond to the challenges of school lockdown.
“Since the start of the summer term, the council has distributed more than 800 laptops to vulnerable and disadvantaged young people on the Island, as well as providing internet access to pupils who need it most.
“The Department for Education (DfE) has now allocated a further 780 laptops for Island pupils which will be distributed very shortly, helping to ensure students have access to high-quality remote education during the current pandemic.”
The DfE has been providing laptops and tablets to schools to help access remote education and providing an internet connection to disadvantaged children who need it.
Families should contact their schools if help is needed.
To aid parents who are providing online learning via their mobile phones, networks including Three, Tesco Mobile, EE, Virgin Mobile, O2 and Sky Mobile are offering schemes to temporarily increase data allowances for those who do not have home broadband.
To find out more, you can visit get-help-with-tech.education.gov.uk/about-increasing-mobile-data.
And this Island council will add even more to the number of children in poverty as it fills the new builds with more impoverished from the mainland .
The problem then grows ever worse, no jobs now here.
They and their feckless parents, do not ‘know’ what poverty is; YET.
As countless more homes fill the Isle, yet fewer jobs, less businesses to absorb the amount of young looking for work now, let alone im porting thousands more, then crime and bree ding will be the only way to survive if you ‘want’ a home and a life, for many soon.
Watch, and see if I am right or not.
Perhaps their parents need to sort their priorities out, that or abstain.
If I purchased too many horses, few would wish to fund my life-style choice.
Well ditto here.
And my horse is not a burden for others for life or adding to the issue by reproducing from puberty upwards to increase the drain and demands on the better people to support such for the next generation to contend with only in ever greater numbers.
So of the 15,000 school children on this island, they are claiming almost half are of low poverty and disadvantaged.
There’s a funny smell here and it’s not Sandown sewage treatment plant.
They had better be deducting the cost of the laptop from the benefits package they receive – as we, the taxpayers didn’t agree to seeing the money taken from us against our will in the form of council tax being spent on lappy’s for feckless layabouts brats.
And they just let them out all day to hang around with their mates! They may as well be at school
Without making any judgemental comments, if it is true that there are a total of 15,000 school-age children on the Island, it is a truly staggering figure that nearly half of them are deemed to live ‘in poverty.’ Will the council provide evidence and facts about how they arrive at that figure, I wonder?
How come there’s so many of these so called “struggling families” here on the Island? Where have they all come from?
Come to live here from elsewhere or just local feckless types who are good at nothing except breeding?
It’s been known for decades that oh yeah they’ll look after you and give you somewhere to live if you have kids. they can’t do enough for you then, it doesn’t take much for them to live by that dictate, and it’s gone on here since the 80s and look where we are now, the place is full of them, they are everywhere you go, the feckless types, you cant get away from them, dope smoking, drinking, benefits absorbing, germ spreading because half the time they won’t cover their faces like the rest of us do to try and help stop the spread of this damn virus.
Genuine people who struggle are ignored, but the sort who are the way they are because of lifestyle choices get handouts and help, and then complain that it;s not enough..
Let’s face it, the whole of British society has been gong down the toilet for decades now.