Teacher laptops

[ethelredtheunsteady]

Were staff in secondary schools normally issued with laptops before Covid? My daughter's school was fundraising for staff laptops for the remote teaching, but if it's not a normal thing why is it not covered by the extra money the Government said schools could claim for Covid expenses? There was lots in the news about student laptops, but I didn't see much about teacher laptops, so I wonder if most of the teachers had one anyway?

Small rural school. No laptops provided. No money. Classroom desktops barely work.

Teachers at my school don’t have laptops ... we use our own

We have (barely fit for purpose) laptops in school, but no way of enabling them to connect to home WiFi. First lockdown was a nightmare as regards technology, SMT and admin were given work from home laptops, but not class teachers.

We were all given one sept 2020 for online learning. A cheap one. No idea how they managed to pay for them all!

At the primary school my sister works in, all teachers are given a new laptop every 3 years.

Wow!

I borrowed a laptop from school in lockdown. It was from the ICT suite so just used by the pupils to access the internet. There's no way I could have done my job on it, it was so slow it took ages to load each document.
I used my own laptop and let my son use the slow one for his occasional online lessons. He now has a full online timetable and will need to use my laptop. If schools are closed I'll have to manage with the school crap, which will limit my output.

We were asked to let work know if we needed IT for lockdown, so I did, and was told there weren't any.

This thread needs to be rolled out when the inevitable MN complaints begin.

20 years of secondary teaching and I have never been given any tech! We even had to call our tutees twice during the last lockdown using our own phones - IT helpfully sent out instructions on how to hide our numbers.

I have a colleague who’s only access to Teams at home is via her smart TV. A young maths teacher used their phone. There were many others. One parent I spoke to who was complaining about lack of contact was amazed to hear that I was sharing a laptop with my 3 school age children. So we had to choose between my job and their education.

@Subordinateclause

I'm a still flabbergasted by this. I work part time and am the breadwinner (for legitimate reasons I won't go into!). I genuinely couldn't have afforded to buy myself a laptop if I had been expected to. The ridiculous thing is it wouldn't cost a school anywhere near what individual teachers are having to pay because they would get bulk deals, in the same way when a school gets a set of iPads they don't pay anything like retail price.

Please let me know how we can get a large discount when buying a number of iPads for school- Apple have it sewn up and discounts, if any are very minimal if available. None of our staff have school laptops, we just don't have the budget to provide them.

Some schools I worked in gave every member of staff a device (either tablet or laptop) which they take to each classroom with them. Other schools had networked desktops only in each classroom and you'd have to hope you got to the staff room quickly to use one in your PPA.

I've just spent all my "personal" money for the next few months buying a second hand laptop for work.

Had an email from our head today explaining we can work from home if we can be sure we can provide good quality lessons and reiterating that school can’t/won’t provide laptops.