U.K. E-Learning: Disproportionately Affecting Marginalized Students
Aya Kodmani
LONDON—Maya is a six year old girl who lives in a council house in North London and attends a nearby public school. Her parents are immigrants from the Philippines--her mother is a cleaning lady and her father works in a pharmacy. Since January, when England went into a national lockdown and school closed indefinitely, Maya, like many other young children, has been forced to result to the incredibly difficult online school system. Due to her family’s low income, however, her experience has been very different to the private school virtual learning environment that other students, myself included, have experienced. Every day, when her parents go to work, she is taken to her neighbour’s house (where her fellow classmate lives), and together they share an old computer, attending one zoom for 10 minutes just to register into class before spending the rest of the day attempting to complete difficult tasks and worksheets sent by their teachers with no assistance. Maya gets easily frustrated and distracted, and without the constant stimulation from a teacher, she struggles to finish the challenging work that has been assigned. She, like many other of her classmates, has missed a large quantity of content and is very far behind from where children of her age should be. During the first lockdown last March and the current lockdown, Maya and many other of her classmates have received no benefits or assistance from the government or the Department of Education. It is uncertain when Maya will return to school properly and how bad the Covid situation will be then, but there is no doubt that it will be extremely difficult for her and other minority public school students to get back on track of the curriculum.
COVID has undoubtedly had severe impacts on everyone, but ethnic minority groups in particular have arguably suffered the most. Hospital statistics clearly demonstrate this thesis, with one-third of COVID admissions being from an ethnic minority in the UK, despite composing one-eighth of the population.* The UK is not an exception. All over the world, study after study has proved that people of colour are more strongly impacted and more likely to die from the virus than white people. Crucially, one of the consequences of this drastic divide is the suffering of ethnic-minority children in the public education system.
In England, a large proportion of non-white children attend public, state-funded primary and secondary schools. A study done by Demos integration hub showed that 90% of ethnic-minority students in London begin school in ethnic-minority-majority schools (almost all public) because most of these families cannot afford private education and therefore need to send their children to nearby schools. Unfortunately, many of these public schools are poorly funded by the government although their pupil body is typically significantly larger than their private school counterparts. In the last ten years alone, government spending on students in primary schools across the country has fallen by 8%, while in the last two years, the number of students has risen by 17%. Although the school populations are increasing, their buildings and campuses are not (due to limited money they have to spend on expanding as well as the little space there is to expand in crowded inner cities), creating a more densely populated school environment, where children and teachers interact more closely together in small classrooms and playgrounds. Sanitation is sub-optimal, classrooms have poor ventilation and overall the setting is ideal for COVID (and other diseases) to spread.
During COVID, parents have become aware of these conditions, especially parents from ethnic minority groups, and many have consequently refrained from sending their children to school as they fear they could catch the virus and bring it home infecting family members. Crucially, for people of colour who know they are at higher risk from the virus, this is a major issue: possibly leading to family members being very ill for long periods of time and potentially dying. On the financial side, family members fear that if they are off from work for these long periods of time due to illness, they could be laid off, possibly the most severe consequence, especially during these very hard and uncertain times. Additionally, the healthcare services in these more deprived areas tend to be understaffed and overcrowded. Some hospitals even encourage ill patients to stay at home if they can, instead of being treated in the hospital where the concentration of infected patients is so high and equally the risk of the illness.
Primary school children of colour whose parents do not want to risk them catching the virus at school have no choice but to stay at home and continue their studies virtually. As many of us know from our own experience, online school is significantly inferior to that of in-person. For these more deprived children, it is even worse.
The biggest issue is accessing the technology resources that are in high demand and difficult to afford. This includes laptops, iPads, and even WiFi networks which are of suitable quantity and quality. Many children who have very limited access to these supplies are at a huge disadvantage, in comparison to their other classmates who at school, do not suffer from the issue. Moreover, the younger children who are incapable of sitting through the whole day by themselves doing online school, require an adult to supervise them. This leads to many parents having to sacrifice their own work to stay home, or in worse scenarios, older siblings having to sacrifice their studies to take care of the children.
Another pressing concern is how these children are being fed while learning at home. When at school, parents did not need to worry, thanks to the free school meals that were provided daily. Similarly, at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was at home, the government tried to deliver the school meals that would be given at school to homes around the country. However, when everyone went back to school, this process ceased. Unfortunately, for the minority children who stayed at home, they could no longer rely on receiving the free school meals for which they were eligible. Some schools tried to help this, but as time went on, less effort was put into delivering food to the small number of children at home around the area. As a result, parents had to spend more money on food for their children to compensate for them missing out on the free meals they would ordinarily receive if they were at school. This bill quickly accumulates and leads to families struggling even more financially. Moreover, some children are under-fed and consequently are unable to focus during their lessons throughout the day.
As a 16-year-old girl from a predominantly white private school student perspective, to say that my online school experience is different to that of an ethnic minority dominant school is an understatement. From 8:30am to 4:00pm, all my online lessons are actively taught by my teachers. Everyone is working on individual laptops and iPads at high-speed WiFi levels, and realistically, the experience is not that far off from actually being in school. I am old enough to be left unsupervised throughout the day, and at length, the struggles I experience are hugely insignificant to the struggles that disadvantaged ethnic minority students face. This divide in the national education system is catastrophic, and it is shocking that it took a pandemic for these disparities to be realised domestically and internationally realised.
Not only is this damaging in the short term, but also in the long term, as privileged private school students progress normally through the curriculum, others are at a severe disadvantage, being left weaker in learning areas and having to try to actively catch up in topics they have missed--a very difficult process to do, especially for younger children. Ultimately, the consequences are detrimental to the education of these disadvantaged children of colour, and the government is simply not doing enough to help.