Mr. Michael Gillespie:

A lot of students do not have laptops. At the end of last year, our research showed that the vast majority of students were depending on their phone. The only devices they had to access the Internet and whatever was being put up on the school website were their phones. The phones do not have the capacity to put up programmes, etc., so they were actually just using their phone to go onto the websites of the schools and trying then to translate that into the homework they were doing. It is not just about a lack of broadband; it is about a lack of devices in homes. Even if a household has broadband, they may not enough devices for all the school-going children to use at the same time within the hours in which people do their homework - between 4.30 p.m. and 7 p.m. It is not as simple as putting stuff onto the laptops, it is the fact of the lack of devices in homes and the other uses to which the devices that are available have to be put.