At Cheselbourne Village School, Fridays used to be known as “go-slow Fridays”. This was not, as you might assume, down to the Dorset primary school engaging in a wellbeing initiative in which the frantic pace of a life education was decelerated. If anything, go-slow Fridays increased stress and worsened wellbeing.

This ponderous part of the week was not down to choice, but the fact the internet in this rural part of the country was horrendously slow for most of the week - and then managed to get even slower on the last day before the weekend. 

“I hear it was painful,” says current headteacher Chris Perry.

He explains that staff had struggled with a 0.5Mbps connection that would often drop to even slower speeds. To give you an idea of how slow that is, downloading a 100MB file would take 26 minutes, while it would take over four hours to download a 1GB file - which, in the digital era, is not that large. As for video calls: forget it.

The go-slow Friday at Cheselbourne may sound like an amusing running joke about a lack of infrastructure in rural communities from The Vicar of Dibley, but the reality was this slow internet access had a real impact on the school.

At a basic level, Perry says staff dared not move to electronic registers because of the risk of these not updating online - and so the school persisted with paper systems, while teachers were reluctant to incorporate web sources into their lessons. But in truth, it hindered everything the school tried to do. 

“Teachers really didn’t want to take risks with using technology in certain ways, because it was that much of a barrier,” he notes.

It is easy to imagine how disastrous for everyone in the school this would have been during the pandemic, when the government instructed schools to move online and, consequently, when online provision became the go-to for a child who, for any reason, was not able to attend school. But Cheselbourne Village School got lucky. 

In 2019, the school was involved in a pilot programme run by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to improve connections in the most rural schools by delivering speeds of 1,000Mbps - often termed “gigabit broadband”.

“It’s completely relaunched everything that we do,” says Perry, with cloud tools and digital resources now commonplace.

The intention - accelerated by the pandemic - was that there would be similar salvation for every school in this situation. And for some, it did happen: the government said in October last year that 1,084 schools had received this upgrade.

Yet, the reality is that thousands more remain stuck in the slow lane, with school standards minister Robin Walker revealing there are 3,835 schools in Britain in postcode areas that “do not have access to full-fibre [broadband] or are currently not in areas of proposed commercial build within the next five years”.

That’s a lot of schools that risk being left behind, stuck on slow speeds that just aren’t suitable for modern teaching, in which the internet underpins much of what a school does. In turn, that raises two important questions: how disadvantaged are the pupils and staff in these schools, and what is the government going to do about it?

Teaching was already going digital before the pandemic hastened the shift. Classrooms are now hybrid environments, in which tablets and laptops are the norm for both pupils and staff.   

Indeed, a recent report from the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) of over 1,300 schools found both primary and secondary leaders are looking to improve wi-fi and broadband connectivity to underpin device rollouts and enhanced use of digital software and services - something BESA director general Caroline Wright says shows how important connectivity has become to school life.

“It’s indicative of the feeling that lots of headteachers still haven’t got the wi-fi and broadband they would want or need to be able to use technology in the way they want,” she says.

The pandemic obviously heightened these needs, and even schools where it was thought internet connections were good began to struggle. 

Mark Chatley, trust leader of Coppice Primary Partnership in Kent, is a leader in exactly that situation, telling Tes that the trust is the process of an upgrade of its infrastructure to try to solve problems caused by its less-than-impressive internet speeds.

“We have noticed this year in particular that our internet and infrastructure has been really struggling. This is frustrating for teachers as we have all the hardware and software, but [slow speeds] prevent us from using it in the best way.”

It’s a situation that a primary school principal in South Wales recognises, too: “We rely heavily on the internet to deliver our curriculum but our internet connectivity varies greatly over the course of a day and leads to children and staff wasting learning time and working hours staring at a loading screen.”

They add: “We have had to put mitigations in place to avoid children becoming bored and frustrated, which quite often means a lack of opportunity for children to engage with new technology and the best resources.”

Meanwhile, a teacher at a school in the West Midlands explains that despite a good connection, they had attempted to teach key stage 3 students video editing skills using a popular online cloud platform in order to build on their engagement with sites such as TikTok and Twitch.

However, the sheer volume of students trying to access the tools and the bandwidth required meant it soon proved unworkable.

“When two Year 9 classes were timetabled at the same time, you’ve essentially got 60 students going up to the cloud, not only for content and pulling clips but for the software itself,” they explain. “So you’ve got 60 machines, all in the cloud, trying to access [Adobe] Premiere, then trying to access clips, then trying to render...lessons just fell apart.”

By December, the school had given up with these video editing plans.

It’s not just the use of teaching resources that are affected by slow or unstable connections. 

Schools are increasingly looking to digitise as many of their school processes as possible - something that again relies on a good internet connection, as James Browning, chief information officer at the Academies Enterprise Trust, outlines.

“From administrative systems that are used for registration, to attendance to behaviour, all these kinds of systems that are the heartbeat of the school, they’re all internet reliant,” he says.

These are the sort of benefits that Cheselbourne was able to realise when it moved to superfast internet with tools such as electronic registers that had an immediate impact. ”We’ve got electronic registers now and electronic sign-in so in terms of safeguarding, it’s had a huge impact because I know who’s in when, at what time,” says Perry

Meanwhile, for teachers, it means they can pick up work on the go and work more efficiently: “The teachers and support staff can use it at home if they need to just gather some thoughts, do a bit of research and continue to plan. They can access [Google Drive] on multiple devices in multiple places.”

These are notable benefits, but as Browning notes, they are based on the “expectation that you have good connectivity to allow you to run [cloud services]” - an assumption that not all schools can readily meet, as we have seen.

What we have been left with, post-pandemic, is - according to Wright at BESA - a “two-tier” system where some schools with high-speed and stable connections are able to take advantage of cloud tools or online resources whenever it suits them, while others are will miss out on this flexibility.

“Unless we sort this out and get a fair level of digital access for all schools in all areas, you are going to see some schools being able to use really good digital software that is available but where there isn’t connectivity it will be more challenging for those schools [so there is a] risk of a digital divide in schools.”

These sorts of issues also make plans for an online digital National Academy seem harder to realise if the resources on offer required a solid internet connection that many schools lack and so are unable to fully utilise what is offered.

So how did we get into this situation?

It is worth noting that the government is ploughing millions into covering the costs of many rural rollouts where it would be financially unviable for commercial companies to do this alone - and helping many schools move to the internet fast line, something Baroness Barran MBE, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Education, has said is vital for the future of the nation.

“Whether it’s supporting teachers to stretch all their pupils to meet their potential or helping children develop the skills they need for modern life, the impact of these [broadband rollout] improvements will be felt by thousands of children and teachers for years to come.”

Yet with Walker’s admission that 3,835 schools are not likely to see a fibre connection arrive at their doorstep for at least five years, it is clear this work will not meet everyone’s needs. 

So what can schools do about this?

Taking matters into your own hands

Frustrated with the lack of progress, one option would be for a school to pay for a dedicated fibre connection. 

This, however, is not cheap, as Justin Leese, chief technology and operations officer at Ogi, an internet service provider that specialises in delivering fibre to rural communities in South Wales, outlines.

“It could be a price tag of £100,000, maybe even £150,000 to dig fibre along the small roads from the [nearest] town and put the fibre in. So the case to just [upgrade] the school in isolation is quite difficult,” he says.

For many rural schools, this seems like a non-starter, but some schools have spread the cost by hooking up all buildings in that area.

“If you can build a case that says, ‘Let’s do the school, and while we’re at it let’s do the whole village,’ then you’ve got the contribution from all of the people in the village and then suddenly you’ve got quite a compelling business case,” explains Leese.

This is exactly what self-described “non-profit community benefit society” group B4RN has been doing since 2011, after its founder realised that there was a pressing need to help rural communities that major providers were not catering for.

It works to bring fibre to a location by securing enough guaranteed interest from those in the region to sign up for its services to make the cost economically viable. What’s more, the residents themselves are usually required to help by physically digging trenches to lay the fibre cable.

This is a model that has resulted in some 9,000 properties being brought online, including 38 schools.

In fact, B4RN CEO Michael Lee says that schools can often be the driving force in convincing those in rural locations to agree to become customers.

“The reason the schools are absolutely key for us is because it is a community dig and the school is often the focal point of the community,” he says. “So if the school buys into what we’re doing, then that’s a really good place for making contact with people.”

One school that has benefited from this work is Crosthwaite Primary School in Cumbria, which now enjoys truly staggering speeds.

“We have a 10-gigabit connection, which is as good as you’ll find anywhere in the world,” says headteacher Matthew Jessop.

It wasn’t always like this, however, with a 10Mbps connection the norm for some time.

However, in the summer of 2020, the school chose B4RN in a tender to boost its broadband speed - in part by using funds from the DCMS’s gigabit schools project but also with the requirement to convince over 100 residents in the village to agree to pay £30 a month for a B4RN fibre connection to make it economically viable.

“It was literally a case of hand-delivering leaflets, setting up Facebook groups, Twitter groups, taking advantage of local church emails and school emails and so on,” Jessop says.

Not only that, but the community group leading the rollout, which included Jessop and governors at the school, also had to negotiate 9km of way leaves (essentially the right to run services over private land) with nearby landowners.

This may sound a bit daunting, but he says the community element of a school often means that landowners are receptive to this requirement.

“I’ve been here for 10 years and know most of the families, and many of them are farmers who own the land so most were very keen to help out,” explains Jessop.

In time, though, the plan came together and the school now has the huge speeds mentioned - and all for free, as B4RN’s terms of service mean that once an installation is complete, access to schools, village halls and churches is free of charge.

The upshot of all this is that since the high-speed broadband service was switched on, a whole host of activities are now possible to teachers, from showing HD videos to making video calls to a partner school in Norway - a project that was covered by the Norwegian state broadcaster.

It has also made it possible to start to teach students to code using Minecraft in lessons and even to start to engage in a Prince’s Trust enterprise scheme so that pupils can sell the school’s honey, veg boxes and even alpaca meat through the school website.

Developing pupils’ digital skills

“It used to be if you wanted to start a business you had to leave here but with these connections at schools, the kids are building businesses from age 11 - and they can go home and get on a high-speed connection and do it there as well,” Jessop notes.

He says this underlines another reason why a good internet connection is so important in schools now: “These are the sort of digital competencies we need to be building in our young people.”

Meanwhile, on the school management side, Jessop says the move to a gigabits connection has also had major benefits by enabling it to use new cloud tools such as ScholarPack, Google Workspace, ParentMail and Canva.

“Everything we do is in the cloud now - we don’t have anything running on a server and we have taken out subscriptions on lots of new things with confidence because we don’t have to worry about download speeds,” he adds.

This is a compelling case study showing the impact that a high-speed broadband connection can have and it highlights the fact that schools can find alternative ways to boost their internet access without having to wait for a government-backed rollout.

However, it also shows how much work can be required from a school to make it happen. From organising legal access to land, to engaging residents to move to a new broadband provider, it is clearly not a quick or easy process.

But why do schools need to wait for costly, time-consuming and complicated fibre rollouts to take place at all?

After all, we’re all used to accessing high-speed data networks on our phones these days, so could we not harness those instead?

Indeed, a report by broadband analysis firm Point Topic says the average 5G speed in the UK is around 150Mbps. That’s a lot better than 0.5Mbps or 10Mbps, so why not just use that instead?

Well, the reality is that, according to Matthew Howett, CEO of Assembly Research, attempting to use 5G would likely run into the same issues as fibre connection when it comes to availability.

“5G coverage in rural areas is still quite patchy at this stage, so I think if the school has a fixed connectivity problem there is a good chance they won’t have 5G coverage either,” he says.

“What’s more, there aren’t really any off-the-shelf products for 5G that would cover an entire school - it’s more of a consumer offering that might be offered for around five devices.”

However, if a school did have good enough coverage - and coverage and availability checking websites can tell you if you do - then Howett says 5G could act as a useful stop-gap to get at least get some form of high-speed connection on site.

“You could definitely get a classroom covered or access in an office for a lot less money than a fixed connection,” he says.

However, where Howett does see a future for mobile internet access as an alternative to fixed fibre connections is a new area of 5G called 5G private networks.

These networks can essentially be built and run by any operator by harnessing unused portions of the 5G spectrum bands to deliver a private network anywhere in the country without the need for a full licence - something Ofcom has already given the green light to in the UK.

“The spectrum is there for anyone to use, so a provider could come in and put the right equipment around the school and in classrooms and you’d have really high-speed coverage,” says Howett.

Major companies have signalled their plans to enter this market - such as Amazon in the USA - which could mean that in the not-too-distant future schools could have a 5G private network installed that offers superhigh speeds without the need for any fixed assets at all.

Right now this is all at the theoretical stage in the UK, with Amazon refusing to comment on whether it will be moving into this in this country and few other companies making any noise about it.

So it’s likely that a fibre broadband connection is still going to be the most viable route for schools. However, for those that do get these connections, it may sound like this is the end of the saga when that’s not quite the case. 

When the fibre connection does arrive, it will require the school’s wi-fi network to be improved, too - otherwise, it will be running a high-pressure water pump through a garden sprinkler.

This can be something that schools overlook, as Stephen Heppell, who co-authored the Stephenson report into IT in schools in 1997 and then later chaired the Department for Education’s Education Technology Action Group in 2014, explains.

“I go into a lot of schools - they’ve got domestic wi-fi, the sort of stuff that would work in your house,” he says.

This can mean that attempts to get all children online - even with a good internet connection - can fall flat.

“If you’ve got 1,000 kids having an assembly and you want them all to be online [but] the wi-fi network in that room can’t provide for that, then we can’t do the assembly,” he notes.

Browning says this was an issue he saw occurring in Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) schools and so he had to enhance the wi-fi coverage to keep pace with the new data demand on the networks. 

“Pre-pandemic, AET definitely had to spend a significant amount on getting wi-fi up to scratch in a number of schools that are housed in old buildings,” he says.

“On top of that, with the growth of device numbers over the last 24 months, we’ve had to augment further some of the networks to make sure an access point per classroom is the norm.”

The government does appear to be aware of this problem, with Jessop saying that as part of his school’s move to a gigabit connection, the Department for Education stumped up funding to boost its wider infrastructure.

“We put wireless points outside a couple of years ago and we can pick up our wi-fi a kilometre away, so when the kids go out in the fields we can take iPads with us and still connect,” he says.

A digital future - eventually 

Should schools really have to be doing all this chasing? The DfE has told Tes that it is clear the “pandemic has highlighted how crucial reliable and fast internet is in supporting high-quality education” and that it wants “all schools in the country to have access to gigabit-capable broadband as soon as possible”.

“Good use of technology in schools can improve education for pupils, support teachers and staff, and make running a school more efficient,” a spokesperson added.

As the experiences of those here have shown, that is certainly true - from better access to teaching resources and embracing cloud services to boosting one-to-one device rollouts, the power of high-speed internet is plain to see.

No doubt many more will start to experience this new superfast era of schooling soon enough through a mix of government-funded rollouts or innovative local digs - or perhaps even through new spectrum-based services in a few years’ time.

For schools still stuck in the digital slow lane, however, all of this cannot happen fast enough.

James O’Malley is a freelance journalist

Additional reporting by Dan Worth