Home school in Dagenham: three children, no tablet, no computer

When Kelly Rivers left school at 15 she never dreamt she would one day be thrown into the role of teacher to three of her six children, and with no access to a computer, tablet or printer. But that is the challenge she has been facing under lockdown – and she has been finding it tough.

“I have to message a friend whose child goes to the same school and ask what their children have been asked to do,” she says. “And I don’t want to keep asking because they have their own problems.”

The family, from Dagenham, converted their three-bed house into a five-bedroom home by splitting rooms and turning living space into bedrooms. There is no space for a table in the kitchen. Kelly’s husband, Lee, a cleaner and the sole earner, brought back £750 a month before lockdown. His 80% furlough pay has recently come through: “It’s already nearly all gone as we have to pay rent, council tax and other bills,” Kelly Rivers says.

Along with the couple’s three-year-old and three school-age children, the two eldest siblings, Martin, 19, and Jessica, 23, are also at home – plus a two-year-old grandson.

“I’m trying to give my children what they need: clothing and food,” says Rivers. She has limited data on her smartphone and can’t let them use it. “I don’t want to allow one child to use it and then not the other, because it causes arguments, so the best thing to say is ‘no’.” Before lockdown the children could use computers at the library or their grandparents’ house, or after-school clubs.

Bethany and Ruby, both 14, are in year 9 at different secondary schools, while Scarlett, five, is in year 1 at a local primary. Martin is studying for a BTec in engineering, and is accessing emails from college on his phone and doing his coursework on paper.

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None of the children’s schools has any spare laptops or tablets they can lend the family, but Bethany’s headteacher has visited her at home, and Ruby’s teachers have phoned to offer reassurance and support.

Last month, legal activists from The Good Law Project argued that every school-age child being taught remotely had the right to a laptop or tablet and internet connectivity in their home. After the group announced it would sue local authorities to push the government into action, the government said that in England it would start supplying equipment to care leavers, children with social worker support, and “disadvantaged” pupils in year 10 to 12 preparing for exams.

Jolyon Maugham, founder and director of The Good Law Project, says he suspects the government initially failed to anticipate the need to provide laptops and tablets for poorer families. “Education is being delivered online. For more prosperous families that’s not a problem. But poorer families are missing out. My suspicion is that the government has been trying to cover up the slowness of its response. By the time they came to recognise that there were around 1 million children who wouldn’t be able to access education, there was no longer much supply of laptops and tablets.”

Headteachers have been expressing frustration at the lack of progress in getting the help on offer. One of them is Vic Goddard, principal at Passmores academy, Harlow, and star of the 2011 BBC programme Educating Essex. He has been promised just 29 laptops and only 13 routers to share between the 200 families at his school who say they do not have enough technology for their children to learn online.

“My reaction has been verging on the hysterical,” he says. “It’s so frustrating.” Even the 29 laptops he expects to get from the government have not arrived. “I’ve become increasingly cynical about it all.” As far as he’s concerned, it’s a case of “great headlines, small impact”.

In the meantime, to ensure all children have equal access to education at his school, he has stopped offering online learning and is now sending out packs of workbooks for all pupils to complete.

Another headteacher says 107 children at her school were eligible for a laptop but she has been offered just 25, none of which has arrived. “I have been getting messages from families daily who need them. How am I going to choose who gets one?”

Related: England plans to send the wrong children back to school at the wrong time | Laura McInerney

Many schools have been trying hard to reach poorer children. At Parklands primary, in Leeds, one of the most deprived schools in the country, fewer than 20% of children have access to a dedicated tablet, computer or smartphone. The headteacher, Chris Dyson, has been loaning textbooks and ensuring the worst-off families collect food parcels along with their books. “The best home schooling work these children can do is to read. When you read a book, you can get away from all this crisis and go to a new world.

“We’re hoping children will keep their love of learning going by doing bits and bobs, but our priority is their mental wellbeing so when they return to school, they come back safe and happy. Then we can start to pick up on the learning they’ve missed.”

Maugham is sceptical about whether the government will be able to deliver on its promises and is concerned that, even when schools return, many children from poorer families may not. In a recent study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, higher-income parents were more willing for their child to go back to school than lower-income parents, despite the fact that children from better-off families were spending up to 75 more minutes a day – 30% more time – on home learning than poorer children.

Rivers fears her daughters will not qualify for any government devices because they are not yet in year 10, and she is worried about them falling behind. “The most important thing I can do is to make sure they are happy and they’re not stressed. But at the same time, I want them to do well in their work when they go back to school. I don’t want them to need to do a big catch-up, because that will be more stressful for them”

She listens to five-year-old Scarlett read every day, and does her best to encourage her other children to talk about what they were taught in school. A typical day involves TV, board games, books, writing stories or comics, and arts and crafts activities. “We try and spend as much time as we can in the garden – it releases all the steam.”

But the pressure to teach them is taking its toll: “Some days, I just don’t know how I deal with it. I take my hat off to teachers. They need to be paid double.”

Rivers is also full of praise for School Home Support, a charity that works with schools to help families on low incomes and vulnerable children. Jaime McDonald from the charity, who is attached to Bethany’s school, has been trying for weeks to get the family a laptop. “She’s been absolutely brilliant, phoning up every day, asking how I am, even popping round to chat to me and the kids from a safe distance, bless her.”

School Home Support is rolling out a pilot that will give more than 120 families – including the Rivers family – access to technology and data over the next few weeks, thanks to donations from other charities and tech companies. “We knew that access to technology would be a real issue for the families we work with when the learning went online,” said Jaine Stannard, the charity’s chief executive.

She says some families are facing financial ruin and so have more pressing problems to focus on than their children’s schoolwork. Realistically, she thinks a lot of the children will not return to school until at least September: “That’s a long gap to be missing school.”

The children who most need support from their teachers and the government are now further at risk, she says. “They will fall behind. The gap is going to widen.”