The government has revealed why schools had to wait so long for their free laptops to arrive while pupils were stuck at home during the pandemic.

Appearing this morning before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Department for Education (DfE) permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood said global supply constraints “governed” the fact the department couldn’t distribute the devices as quickly as it wanted.

She also said that, once the department started to distribute more laptops to boost access during temporary closures in the autumn term, it was “difficult” to match allocations to the whereabouts of some “three million devices” already out in the system, because the DfE had not collected this information from schools in the past.

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Ten days after the free laptops scheme was announced on 19 April last year, education secretary Gavin Williamson said the devices wouldn’t begin to arrive until the end of May, with the majority being delivered in June.

By 14 June, just over half of the free laptops pledged by the department had yet to be delivered.

Meanwhile, headteachers complained that the devices for disadvantaged pupils were arriving at schools “locked” and unusable.

The DfE went on to miss the education secretary’s June delivery target by nearly 30,000.

More devices were pledged in stages by the DfE for the autumn term, earmarked for disadvantaged children required to stay at home due to Covid.

But the extended scheme also proved controversial when the department cut schools’ laptop allocations just a day after they were given a legal duty to ensure that pupils had instant access to remote education.

Distribution concerns

Presented with concerns about the government’s approach to distribution, Ms Acland-Hood said: “I think the challenge was getting them all out as fast as we all would have liked to in a situation where we were working incredibly hard to get laptops in a global supply situation where everybody wanted laptops.

“Genuinely, the pace over the autumn term was as fast as we could make it, but we were absolutely up against global supply constraints, and that governed the fact that we couldn’t get everything out as fast as we wanted it to.”

In response to queries about how support was tailored to children with the greatest needs, and whether this was achieved with the necessary “granulated data”, Ms Acland-Hood said that the department “could have left it to schools and just provided money rather than providing devices”, but there was “a huge challenge of supply on the international markets”.

“We knew that we would be able to - and I think we did...because of the scale of purchasing - help command the supply and also get decent prices”, she said.

Asked about the department’s rationale for delivering devices, Ms Acland-Hood said: “It very much went in stages. My own view is that this is one of those things where we started off thinking that the disruption might be of short duration, that we were trying to get children back into school as fast as we possibly could.

“So the starting point was identifying a small group of those children right at the high end of the risk spectrum - looked after children, and focusing on Year 10 and 12, so those who were going to face exams in the following year, and that was the focus for the summer term’s laptop distribution, which was 220,000 laptops.

“After that, we then started on laptop distribution that was focused on trying to make sure that schools that were disrupted during the autumn term had enough laptops to make provision for children, so that they could do remote learning for short periods while they were off.

“And the allocations for that were based on children on free school meals, but the overall allocation also took account of the fact that there were around three million devices already out in the system.”

Coordination difficulties

Ms Acland-Hood admitted that the department found it “difficult” to coordinate allocations with the whereabouts of these existing devices.

“What was difficult to do was to match the allocations to where those devices that were already out in the system were, because that is not a piece of information that we had in the past collected from schools. So we were trying to assess that,” she said.

“We didn’t do a distribution that was based on, for example, one per family. Typically that was happening where a school had had an allocation, if they had no devices in school previously, that was lower than their number of free school meals children, then they were working out how to manage that.

“That initial set of allocations, that took account of the number of devices already in the system, added up to some 750,000. We said we would distribute the first half million of those during the autumn term and we did, we slightly exceeded.

“And we then ordered enough that schools could top up if their individual allocation wasn’t enough. And that was the basis, along with the addition of FE colleges, of the 1.3 million that we’ve now said we will distribute.”

Ms Acland-Hood said the “principal” reason the DfE was yet to deliver all 1.3 million devices was that orders were dwindling, as schools had now “got enough devices”.

“So effectively we’ve filled that gap that was there because the data we had didn’t allow us to perfectly match the number of devices already in the system with the places that they were,” she added.