Lockdown Will Only Widen the Gap between Rich and Poor Students By Nick Morrison on April 9, 2020 Closing the gap between rich and poor students has long been a key target of policy makers and school leaders - but the corona virus lockdown is making it wider. With millions of children out of school and parents around the globe reinventing themselves as homeschoolers, the disparity between households has been starkly illuminated. While some parents are relatively well-equipped to teach their children - or to pay for someone else to do it for them - others find it much harder. And levels of disadvantage are one of the key indicators for which category a family will fall into. While just over two fifths (42%) of parents feel confident about teaching their children at home, there is a clear difference between families from different backgrounds, according to a survey released today. Almost half (47%) of middle-class parents said they felt confident about homeschooling, compared to just over a third (37%) of working-class parents. And while some parents have been busy buying educational materials to support their children, students from working class backgrounds are more likely to have had nothing spent on their education during lockdown than their middle-class peers (60% vs 45%). Middle class parents are also more able to afford extra tuition. Although overall use of private tuition has gone down, more affluent parents are more likely to have started new online tuition during the lockdown. The home learning environment has never been more important, but as todays polling shows less than half of parents feel confident about teaching their child at home, said Sir Peter Lample, chairman of the Sutton Trust, the charity dedicated to improving social mobility through education that commissioned the research. Better-off parents are more able than poorer families to spend money on resources and support for their children, he added. While teachers have been busy putting learning materials online while schools are closed, children from disadvantaged families are less likely to be able to access them, either because of a lack of adequate devices or poorer internet connections. Concern over the ability of some children to access materials during the lockdown has prompted a group of legal activists in the U.K. to support action to compel the government to ensure all pupils have computers and adequate internet connections.