Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Education – in the Senedd at 2:39 pm on 13 January 2021.
Thank you, Mick. As I said, we are able to support families with the provision of MiFi devices. We are working closely with colleagues in the Department for Education in England, who are working with communication companies to see what can be done around affordability and access to data. And can I make it clear that, whilst we want to minimise the number of children who are accessing their schools at this time, and that should predominantly be for key worker children and vulnerable children, as an ultimate safety net, there is flexibility for local authorities and headteachers to make provision for students if connectivity is absolutely something that is real barrier to their education? And that is the final safety net that we have put in place as flexibility for local authorities and schools to respond to that, bearing in mind that we are trying to keep numbers in our schools as low as possible for COVID security reasons.