The Prime Minister has been accused of being out of touch after claiming in an election interview that he missed ‘a lot of things’ as a child, including Sky TV
Rishi Sunak’s Treasury blocked plans to give poorer children laptops so they could continue learning at the start of the lockdown, it has emerged.
The Prime Minister has been accused of being out of touch after claiming in an election interview that he missed ‘a lot of things’ as a child, including Sky TV.
Now it can be revealed that when Mr Sunak was Chancellor, civil servants were banned from buying laptops for disadvantaged children. In documents submitted to the Covid inquiry, the top Education Department official said a plan was blocked by the Treasury.
Susan Acland-Hood wrote: “In the early stages of the pandemic, only the most vulnerable children (children in care) were prioritized for laptops. This was because DfE had initially failed to seek funding from HM Treasury to proceed in the early stages. all children.”
Hundreds of thousands of children’s education was hampered during the pandemic because they didn’t have access to the technology they needed to learn from home. Ms Acland-Hood, permanent secretary of the education department, said laptops were eventually purchased for a greater number of children.
In written evidence to the Covid inquiry, she said: “DfE ultimately delivered more than 1.95 million devices (enough to close the gap between laptops already in the system and the needs of disadvantaged children).”
Official figures show that more than 450,000 children struggled to learn from home during the early months of the lockdown due to a lack of laptops, with single-parent households hit hard. A survey found that more than half of parents (52.2%) said their child found it difficult to study after most schools closed their doors.
About 8.5% – the equivalent of 455,384 people – blamed the lack of devices such as laptops for their children’s problems, as access to a computer and the internet has proven to be an important part of homeschooling. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics at the end of June 2020, it rose to 20.9% for households with one parent.
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The figures showed that the poorest families were struggling the most, with 17.5% of parents earning less than £10,000 and saying their children were missing out on education due to the lack of access to laptops.
In an ITV interview, to be shown tonight, Mr Sunak laughed awkwardly when asked if he understands the problems faced by ordinary families.
When asked what he had missed in his life, he said “a lot of things.” Forced to give an example, he said: “All kinds of things, like a lot of people. There will be all kinds of things I would have wanted as a child but couldn’t have. Famous is Sky TV, so that was something we never really had growing up.
Mr Sunak, 44, attended one of the country’s most expensive boarding schools, Winchester College. He and his wife Akshata Murty are the richest Downing Street residents in history. Their combined fortune of £651 million placed them above the King on the list of the country’s richest people.
The Mirror revealed last year that the couple donated $3 million to a mega-rich American university, while British schools are cutting back and saving to pay for even basic necessities. They paid for a computer laboratory at Claremont McKenna in California, where Akshata Murty, the prime minister’s wife, studied economics and French. The 2018 donation came three years after Mr Sunak became MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire.