A fund of £2 million has been launched by the UK IG Group, in partnership with UK charity Teach First. The fund will go to the education of students from disadvantaged backgrounds affected by the spread of coronavirus.
The spread of coronavirus in the UK has left financial devastation to many families with school-going children. Young people have been impacted greatly by the virus, with school closures and for some, inaccessibility of resources to enable them to continue with their online education.
UK IG Group collaboration with Teach First
UK IG group has now partnered with UK Charity Teach First to help these students who are struggling during the current crisis. They have offered an additional £2 million for the work they started in November 2019.
This education fund will be an extension of the charity work the two organizations started last year, where they planned to train 16 teachers in Science Technology, Engineering and Math(STEM). The teachers would come from schools that required help and the partnership was meant to increase access to the STEM for these students.
The funding will be pivotal for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who have now been left behind by their counterparts. Once the schools reopen, the gap between the well off students and disadvantaged students will be clear, especially academically, due to miss learning resources during the coronavirus crisis.
Mitigating coronavirus financial impact on students
Bridging the gap by providing financial support to these students will go a long way in helping these students pick up from where they left and recover, according to the two organizations. The UK IG Group said it believed that once the schools are reopened, the gap will be laid bare and the funds will be used to help improve students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Teach First and IG Group will be helping a hundred schools with the funds. The partnership will first look at the most affected schools, which they have already done, and identified 32 schools. Over the course of three years, the partnership is projected to help over 40,000 students in the UK.
The £2 million ($2.5 million) will be part of a $6.18 million fund that will go into improving people’s lives according to Teach First and the UK IG Group. June Felix, IG Group CEO, said the company was excited to have started a partnership with Teach First and was looking forward to the future of both groups helping the local communities.
Looking back through the years
We call to mind a previous plea for children from disadvantaged backgrounds:
Tens of thousands of children from disadvantaged backgrounds could have their lives transformed if underperforming schools matched the results achieved by similar pupils in the most progressive schools in England, a report says today.
The report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty (SMCP) commission, headed by former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn, says that schools are letting down many children from the worst-off circumstances, while others from similar backgrounds are able to excel.
Apparently, there was some politics involved as some teaching unions took issue with the report’s conclusions, arguing that schools could only do so much to counteract the effects of poverty and circumstance.
The Commission then used the national pupil database to compare schools with similar levels of disadvantage. It then used modeling to discover the effects of schools closing half the gap with the top 20% of schools with similar concentrations of disadvantage. The results showed that at least 14,000 more disadvantaged students each year would pass five good GCSEs including English and maths – a 25% increase.
There were some schools doing it and the question raised was, there is no excuse for others not to, as the report unearthed a new and shocking gap in performance between similar schools serving similar communities. We wonder now how much these perceptions have changed in a span of 6 years.
