Covid-19: food insecurity, digital exclusion and Catholic Schools

Abstract

Covid-19 and the subsequent worldwide lockdowns have had a major impact on families and school education. The lockdowns have highlighted and exacerbated the disadvantages experienced by those children who suffer from child poverty. This article focuses on food insecurity and the digital divide, or digital exclusion, and argues that these have emerged as very pressing issues during lockdowns for children suffering from child poverty. The article provides an outline of the response of the Catholic Church and Catholic schools, primarily in the United Kingdom. There have been some concerted efforts to address food insecurity by providing food and food vouchers for children and vulnerable families. It has proved more problematic to address digital exclusion and the article argues that for those children who experience digital exclusion, this can effectively mean exclusion from the religious education, religious life, community and the pastoral and spiritual support that is normally offered by the Catholic school.

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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Identifiers

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40839-020-00112-8

Repository URI

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/223146/