Keywords
Home access, Internet, Low-income households
Project Aims
The Home Access Program (HAP) was a £300
million pound UK Government program launched in Autumn 2008 and closed in
Spring 2011, with Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology
Agency) as the delivery agency. It allowed low-income households with children
aged 5 to 19 years to apply for a grant to purchase a computer (a laptop,
Net-book or desktop), free Internet connectivity and technical support for one
year from an accredited supplier.†
The program was underpinned by an explicit
intention to help to address social inequity, and to provide opportunities for
local education authorities to raise the quality of education for all. More
specifically, the program objectives were to provide wider opportunities for
pupils to engage in formal and informal learning, to increase parental
engagement with schools and colleges, to increase the attainment of pupils, and
to increase awareness of the economic and social benefits of having access to
ICT at home.
The program awarded grants to more than
250,000 families and more than 8,000 children with profound disabilities,
special educational needs or who face challenges accessing computers and the
internet.
Becta commissioned a consortium of SQW
Consulting with Ipsos MORI and London Knowledge Lab (IoE) to conduct a
longitudinal evaluation of the programme over the period 2009 to 2011. The
evaluation is formative, in that it identified lessons from the pilot phase in
order to help shape the design of the national roll-out, and summative, in that
it seeks to establish the net impacts of the intervention.
Key details, themes, etc. here
The overall
evaluation research questions were as follows:
Has the
programme succeeded in providing home access to technology for the target group?
What has been the net effect of the programme?
Is there a
measurable increase in the proportion of families within the target group who
use ICT to support their learning? How does this proportion compare with that
in more wealthy
socio-economic groups?
Is there a
measurable increase in the proportion of families within the target group whose
perception of the value of having ICT at home to support learning has increased?
Does home
access to technology lead to the intended benefits, including greater use of
home ICT for educational purposes, a more personalised education, enhanced motivation and
skills, and increased educational attainment?
Is the
programme effective and efficient in delivering home access to the target group?
The methods employed include Stakeholder
consultations, research and policy literature review, analyses of national,
local and beneficiary data, case studies,†
and an in-home survey.
