Sutton Council and partners come together to provide hundreds of laptops and devices to support local children’s learning

Over 200 new or unneeded devices, and additional funds for new devices, have been kindly donated by partners including Sutton Housing Partnership, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and Riverdale Developments. The donated devices are going through an accredited wiping and repurposing process so that they can be given to schools and settings to be used by children and young people - 60 have already been distributed and the remaining devices will follow over the next few weeks.

Sutton Council has worked with IT partners including the London Grid for Learning, who provided initial scheme resourcing and Mer-IT Digital, to ensure the success of this partnership with local businesses.  The scheme will pass ownership of all donated devices to Sutton schools or settings so that they become part of their own IT resource pool.

Each school or setting that receives donated devices will be able to lend them to children and young people according to their individual needs. The devices will support the completion of school work and enable remote learning. 

Whilst the Government has announced that all pupils will return to school on 8 March, these devices will continue to support pupils outside school hours or where pupils might need to self isolate. This will enable these pupils to access remote learning as and when they need to. 

Councillor Jenny Batt, Lead Member for Education and Schools at Sutton Council said;

“We are ambitious for children and young people and acknowledge that for many people across Sutton digital disadvantages can place limits on learning. This has only been made even more challenging as a result of Covid-19. We are extremely thankful to all of the businesses and organisations who have kindly donated laptops, routers and devices to the Council to redistribute as part of this scheme.”

“Despite there being light at the end of the tunnel by way of easing restrictions, we know that distance learning will still be a major part of children and families lives for the foreseeable future. This scheme should help ease that difficulty and provide families most in need with extra resources”.