Over the last year, Little Lives UK has been running a project to donate items of technology to schools and individuals who most need them. Through the donations of technology that we have made between September and November, we are proud to announce that we have donated over 200 devices.
As part of our technology project, we have worked with three schools in London to donate 88 tablets between October and November. In some cases, it may not have been the school itself that needed technology. But we have uncovered that there is a startling number of students who didn’t have access to the devices that they needed. Consequently, many children were without the proper resources they needed to access the standard of education every child deserves.
First, Little Lives UK donated tablets to St. Mary of the Angels Catholic Primary School. Before the donation, they only had “12 teacher iPads, which are used by teachers to document evidence of learning” and due to COVID restrictions they did not have enough portable devices to share between all the children at their school. This has meant that “It has been difficult to incorporate any form of digital/online learning due to this.” Until now. After the donation of 28 tablets from us to complete a class set will mean that the tablets can “ be used to consolidate learning in all areas of the curriculum, but particularly in Literacy and Maths”. The tablets also allow opportunities for students to work in “small groups” and “interventions to target students who need further support”. Teachers at St. Mary of the Angels Catholic Primary School now have the chance to “design innovative lessons and provide learning opportunities for children” and therefore encourage children to make progress at a much faster rate.
Next, we made a donation of 20 tablets to St. Peter’s Primary School. The school reached out to us after discovering they had at least 20 families in their school who did not have the relevant devices to allow their children to complete home learning activities. Much of their learning before had to be printed and distributed out to students making it a long-drawn-out process. Little Lives UK was able to fix this issue and provide a tablet to each of these families. The children can now “access remote learning when they are self-isolating and consequently make progress in their learning.” This will consequently allow “teachers to use more video teaching clips as all the children can now access them”.
For students at St. Stephen’s Church of England primary school, the situation was slightly different. After the first lockdown in March teachers across the country faced the same dilemma. How could lessons adapt to fit the new parameters? Through this process, teachers learned that in many households there was not adequate access to a device with “some children” have “only able to view the school website by looking at their mum’s phones”. In extreme cases, students were not able to access online learning at all.
Through our donation of 40 tablets, we have been able to help St. Stephen’s rectify this situation. All of the 40 tablets will be sent out to “the families who most need it”. This creates an “equitable platform from which all children will be able to access the learning”. Allowing the “teaching staff to plan a greater range of engaging learning tasks, without the need to plan additional paper-based learning”.
Many more schools and families in our area still need donations in order to receive the quality of education they deserve. I urge you to please click here if you have any devices at all that you no longer require. Even if it is an older device that doesn’t work anymore, please do get in touch with us. Every single donation helps us work with our community for the betterment of local children and young people.
