St John’s School and Community College in Marlborough has been running a parent ICT course for the past two years. The school, which has 1,400 pupils aged 11-18, has a large percentage of students with a home computer and Internet connection (more than 80 per cent), but as Duncan Millard, director of ICT, notes: “We realised that with the growth of computers, many parents did not have the skills to help children use the Internet and do other things with ICT.” The first year saw the school offer 10 courses covering areas such as word processing and the Internet. But this year the school has offered 35 courses, which include computer maintenance and Web design. One course, ICT for the Terrified, was massively over-subscribed.

Mr Millard says the school has been testing RM’s EasyLink with a group of students to give them access to resources on the school’s server, but Millard says: “We’ve had to be careful, because the school pays for the call back to the student’s home, and so there are costs to consider (RM says this does not happen with schools that have broadband, always-on connections). We’ve had parents and grandparents attending our courses and it’s great to be able to put on the courses. But we do realise that we’re in a lucky position in having the resources to be able to do this,” says Millard.

The James Hornsby school in Basildon, Essex, is an 11-16 school with 850 students. It runs after-school ICT courses for parents and pupils with help from the Basildon Adult Education College. The courses, which last for around 90 minutes to two hours, are organised by Jan Grover, the school’s special educational needs co-ordinator: “We’ve designed the courses to appeal to both groups, so when we cover, say, the Internet, the kids might go to an educational site on Africa, while the parents would look for sites offering cheap flights,” she says.

Andrew Hutchinson, the school’s deputy head, says there are many challenges: “We are in one of the most deprived local education wards in England and only 25 per cent of our children have a computer at home. There was a time when if you put “free” and “computers” together you couldn’t cope with the demand, but there are a sizeable number of parents who are loath to get involved with these types of courses. Another issue is remunerating staff who run ICT training courses. Fortunately, Basildon Adult Education College provides funding, so we can pay teachers who run these courses, but then you have to ask: what about PE teachers who give up their time to run sports activities? I think we also need to look at teaching contracts and whether some staff should teach from, say, midday to 9pm, to cover evening courses. We want our parents to be confident in using ICT, but for some of them school is not the best place to do this. We also need to go out into communities.”