Spiral donates Chromebooks to help UK students during COVID-19 lockdowns

It’s been over a year since COVID-19 struck the world, and at Spiral we continue to think about the impact it has on our most vulnerable people – and not just in a clinical context. 

With many schools around the world in lockdown, students are expected to learn from home with online lessons. But what happens when a family doesn’t have a device? Or just one device to share between children?

With this in mind, Spiral recently donated four new HP Chromebooks to Grange First Primary School in the UK. They’re a low decile school in one of the more economically challenged parts of London, and while the government had provided some Chromebooks to assist at-home learning, they were still short. That meant children were having to join lessons from their parent’s phone, or in families with more than one sibling, share devices. This often meant that one or more siblings simply didn’t get to do lessons that day.

“Many of our children were already at a huge disadvantage prior to the pandemic and the lack of access to technology during school closures had the potential to set them back even further. Having a chromebook meant not only access to daily lessons and learning but also to invaluable support, friendship and community.” said Deputy Head, Hannah Watson.

“Everyday we see the real effect of Covid-19 through enrolments in our trials. These are real people not just numbers to us and, having heard Hannah’s story about disadvantaged children, I wanted to help out in a real way that would help those families.  Education is one of the keys to a better future and a child that is helped by our donation could go on to be anything, maybe even a doctor or a software developer, and I didn’t want a child to miss out on that opportunity. ” – Audrey Shearer, Founder & CEO, Spiral

Why the UK? Spiral has a big connection with the UK, in part because of the huge number of patients there who have been enrolled in the REMAP-CAP trial, an adaptive clinical trial running on Spiral’s Spinnaker platform that studies the most effective way to treat COVID-19, among other illnesses. So it made sense to give back to a school in a part of the world where Spiral was already helping out in. 

The school’s headteacher, Daniel Kerber, filmed a video to thank the Spiral team, and it included a motivating sentiment:

“Here at Grange Primary School, deep in the West of London, we are not going to let any barriers of disadvantage, of poverty, of technology, hold back our students from learning.”

“This act of generosity will really uplift us, inspire us and get more of our children who have struggles, to get onto our online learning: learning with no barriers.

The Chromebooks have gone on to help those who were struggling to give their children access to learning: one to a child who had been using his mum’s phone, one to a family of triplets who would now be able to all do their lessons at the same time, and another to a Year 6 child with six siblings.

“A massive thank you to Audrey Shearer and the Spiral team, thank you for all you’re doing to fight the pandemic around the world,” said Mr Kerber. “Thank you for being a part of our extended Grange Primary family.”