SOME of Brimbank’s most disadvantaged primary school students in Sunshine and St Albans are, for the first time, plugging into the information super highway as part of a plan to improve access to online learning in Melbourne’s West.
The new Computer for Every Child pilot project will give up to 400 students in six primary schools – Sunvale, St Albans, Braybrook, Sunshine North, Sunshine East and Dinjerra – access to a computer and Internet connection.
The project will be funded using a combination of government, corporate and philanthropic funding, and the State Government hopes the plan will be rolled out across the rest of Melbourne if the pilot is successful.
Based around a similar scheme that began in France more than a decade ago, families will pay a one-off $50 fee and will receive a computer, an Internet connection and basic training for the student and a parent.
Students from Sunvale and St Albans began receiving the computers late last year, and around 70 computers have been handed out to the schools so far.
Last Tuesday Minister for Victorian Communities Peter Batchelor launched the trial program at Sunshine’s Sunvale Primary School, stressing the importance of the Internet in early childhood development.
Mr Batchelor said the “have and the have-nots of the 21st Century are those who are computer literate and those who are not”.
“The reality is that there are lots of families, particularly in the Western suburbs, who are missing out on opportunities because they simply cannot afford a computer or the Internet access or the training how to use it.”
Nine-year-old Percy, a grade 4 student at St Albans Primary School, was given a computer as part of the program last year.
He said his family’s new Internet connection was extremely useful.
“It has helped me very much to get the access to the Internet and helped me work at home,” Percy said last week.
St Albans Primary principal Graham Haslam said this would be the first chance many of his students – and often their families – would have to regularly access to the Internet at home.
“For our kids, it’s their first opportunity, and we have a lot of refugee children at St Albans Primary, and they’ve missed a lot of the initial things that most families receive, so this is certainly putting them in the picture.”
He said of the 365 children at the school, around 100 would have come to Australia from Africa like Percy, and very few would have computer literacy skills.
