Chris Mole MP today welcomed the Government’s announcement that funding will be made available to students from low-income families in Ipswich to help them both purchase laptops and access the internet, and called for Suffolk to be given priority in piloting the scheme.

The £300 million scheme contains plans to give vouchers – ranging from £100 to £700 - to 1.4 million children growing up in the UK without access to the internet, to ensure that all children have internet access at home by 2011. The programme was announced this week as a key plank of the Prime Minister’s speech to Labour Party conference.

The programme will ensure that school students have fair access to internet so that everyone can benefit from learning materials that will help their education.

Chris said:

“Suffolk schools have had an outstanding record of using Information Communication Technology (ICT) to help pupils to learn, and therefore I think that the county would be an outstanding candidate to pilot this important scheme.

“I am confident that Ipswich schools would ensure those students that needed help most with buying a laptop or accessing the internet would build on their strong record of using internet based curriculum materials.”

The Prime Minister said:

“We want to enable all families to use the internet to link back to their children's school. We will fund over a million extra families to get online, on the way to our ambition of Britain leading the world with more of our people than any other major economy able to access the internet and broadband.”