The government has today announced its plan to give free laptops and broadband access to 270,000 low income families. The intention, it says, is to improve children’s educational opportunities and ensure that busy parents can keep better track of how their kids are doing at school.
Those are laudable aims, and while we’re not certain this is the best way to go about achieving them, it’s clear that the government’s announcement demonstrates the incredible power the internet has as an educational tool.
At TalkTalk we were at the vanguard of opening up access to the internet, through our groundbreaking free broadband and free laptops offers. Through our work with UK Online Centres for its Get Online Day initiative, and our own Digital Heroes Awards, we’ve supported the drive to include everyone in the digital revolution.
All of us would benefit if we could get the digitally excluded – around 10 million people, generally those on lower incomes – online. Martha Lane Fox’s Digital Inclusion Task Force has calculated that £900m of government costs could be saved if all of those 10m people currently not using the internet were to interact just once a month via computer, rather than by phone or face-to-face.
In our modern world, digital literacy is becoming as important as "normal" literacy was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We need to think seriously about how we ensure every child in Britain has access to the internet and the wonderful possibilities it opens up. We might not agree on all the details, but we’re glad that political parties seem to be taking this issue on board and are coming up with policies to respond to it.
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