The result.

It’s great to have plan.com on board as we seek to tackle this inequality. They understand our cause, they are passionate about what we’re doing, and their support has been invaluable to help children in need.

Once Teach First had identified the most in-need schools over a wide geographical area across the UK and put together a budget and project plan for each, plan.com developed a framework for how that budget could best be used to address schools’ data and dongle requirements and to roll out the technology. In order to ensure students had sufficient data for all their needs, which might include downloading videos or participating in live lessons, over a prolonged timeframe, it was decided that each user should have an allocation of 50 gigabytes of data over a 12-month period.

The plan.com platform was essential in providing visibility and control over this data usage. For instance, it was important that parameters could be set to prevent students from exceeding their data allowance, and that cost centres could be created for each individual school to give transparency over data consumption.

In all, around 80 schools have now been supported with more than 1,600 dongles, some of which were assigned to individual pupils, while others were given out on rotation to multiple students, depending on each school’s preference. The sentiments of this headteacher sum up the powerful impact the Teach First initiative has had. Claire Holmes, Headteacher of Monkwick Infant School in Colchester said: “We would like to say thank you so much … our families have been really touched by the gesture and are very grateful. For some of our families, the younger children have now been able to access online learning as their older siblings had been prioritised. Families have really felt cared about by receiving this gesture of support.”

Those words resonate with Emma Stratford. “It’s something that most people take for granted, but in the past year, being digitally-enabled has made the difference between learning and not learning for young people,” she says. “For many students, internet access is extremely limited, and some have none at all. This is not just a digital divide – it’s a learning divide, and evidence suggests that ten years of progress is needed to close the attainment gap due to school closures during Covid-19 lockdowns.