SWINDON SCHOOL GETS LAPTOPS FROM IT COMPANY BRIDGING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

IT firm helps bridge digital divide. Wiltshire company, Piority IT, have presented Dorcan Academy Head, Sherryl Bareham, with five free laptops. The gift will support students lacking access to suitable IT at home.

Ms Bareham expressed her joy at the donation. Itself a result of the school’s new head of music, Mrs Matthews, who saw that Priority IT were donating laptops to schools across the county.

Many students at Dorcan Academy come from a lower income background. This means that there’s often no access to a laptop at home. Or, if there is one, then it’s shared. The upshot is that online learning gets compromised.

Dorcan Academy headteacher Sherrly Bareham with Kieran Thomas, MD of Priority IT.  IT Firm Helps Bridge Digital Divide
Dorcan Academy headteacher Sherrly Bareham with Kieran Thomas, MD of Priority IT. 

Headteacher of the Covingham school, Mrs Bareham said:

“We have received 57 new laptops from the Government for our most disadvantaged students. Yet we have other students who didn’t meet the criteria but were also in need. This donation will enable us to support them too. We want all our students to be able to access online learning.”

Priority IT

Based in Westbury, Priority IT, supports small and medium businesses with their IT systems. Kieran Thomas is the managing director.

He said:  “We’ve been running a laptop refurbishment initiative for home schooling during this time.  We asked local businesses and individuals to donate any unloved laptops to us.  We then wiped the data on them, test, upgrade before donating to any individual, school, charity or organisation to help with home schooling.”

The company started doing this after requests for laptops started to come in when lockdown came into force. In particular they came from those who were having to home school and couldn’t afford new or even secondhand laptops. 

This really showed me and my team the extent of the digital divide,” Kieran said.

Seeing a way to help to bridge the digital divide

“We came up with an idea to help out.  We didn’t have any laptops ourselves as we had sent all our spare kit to clients to help out with remote working.  The solution was to ask for any old laptops from contacts and local business owners. We would do what we could to get them up and running and then donate them to students without access to tech at home.”  

To date Priority IT has donated 100 laptops, to schools in the county, Wiltshire Social Services, some charities and also to nominated individuals in need.

To find out more about the company visit https://www.priority-it.co.uk

See more Swindon in Business posts here: https://swindonian.me/category/swindon-in-business/

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