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Dept for Education and Skills

Answer

Mr. Brady: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what additional IT resources he will provide to assist primary schools in the development of language teaching at key stage 2. [89331] Mr. Stephen Twigg: A total of £710 million has been made available to schools in England through the ICT in Schools Standards Fund over the 2002-04 financial years. This funding is targeted to improve schools' ICT infrastructure and connectivity. It is for individual LEAs to decide how the funding is distributed to schools in line with their ICT development plans. An additional £30 million has been distributed to schools in September 2002 in the form of eLearning Credits (eLCs) for the sole use of buying certified curriculum online digital learning products. A further £20 million will be distributed in April 2003. We will continue to work with public and private sector providers to increase provision, raise the quality and widen the range of online teaching and learning materials. The new curriculum online service will facilitate teacher access to high quality electronic materials across the curriculum and will stimulate the development of materials for languages as well as for other subjects. There are also many online and offline ICT resources already available for teachers, including the British Educational SoftwareDatabase and the National Grid for Learning website. The Department is currently considering other ways of using ICT to support the teaching and learning of Modern Foreign Languages at Key Stage 2.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

89331; 397 c122-3W

Session

2002-03

Subjects

Curriculum ICT Languages Primary education

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk