Picture a family raising a disabled child. The laptop is how the child joins lessons on the days they are too unwell for school. It runs the app that helps them communicate. It is the link to the physio, the specialist, the support group that keeps a parent from feeling completely alone. Now picture that laptop breaking, and the family working out whether they can afford to replace it this month, or feed everyone, or keep the broadband on. For thousands of households in the UK, that is not a thought experiment. It is this week.
Family Fund’s new Digitally Excluded 2026 report surveyed 660 families raising disabled or seriously ill children on low incomes. It found that 93% are digitally excluded or at risk of it. Nearly nine in ten said they struggle to afford the internet, the devices, the apps and the assistive software their child depends on. And 69% said online access is essential to their child’s education.
Exclusion hits harder when a child is disabled
For these families, a device is not a convenience. It is the thing that lets a child learn when they cannot get to a classroom, speak when they cannot form the words, and stay connected when isolation is already a daily risk. Their needs are greater, and their household budgets are tighter. That combination is what the report lays bare: the families who most need technology are the ones least able to pay for it.
The report puts it plainly. Many of these families are one broken device or one broadband bill away from being forced offline. When your child’s education and wellbeing run through a single laptop, losing it is not an inconvenience. It is a cliff edge.
This is an economic problem wearing a technology costume
It is tempting to file digital exclusion under technology, and to assume the answer is somewhere in a future government scheme or a new product launch. It is not. Around 1.6 million UK households still do not own a laptop, tablet or desktop. The barrier is not that the devices do not exist. The barrier is that they cost money these families do not have.
Here is the part that should stop anyone in a boardroom. The devices these families need already exist. They are sitting in storage rooms and IT cupboards inside UK businesses, retired the moment they were replaced, waiting to be recycled or shredded. A working laptop that one organisation has written off is the exact thing that keeps a disabled child learning.
The fix is already in the building
This is the work Reconome exists to do. We collect surplus IT from organisations, wipe it to the highest security standards, refurbish it, and rehome it with the people who need it most. As the exclusive tech partner of the Good Things Foundation, we power the UK’s National Device Bank, and together we have committed to deliver 85,000 devices to digitally excluded people across the country by June 2029.
Every device that goes through that route is one less laptop shredded, one less replacement manufactured, and one more child who can join the lesson tomorrow. The carbon saved is real and reportable. The life changed is real and has a name.
Family Fund is right to call for funded devices and assistive technology for these families. But businesses do not have to wait for a policy to move. The surplus is already yours. The only question is whether it ends up in a shredder or in the hands of a child who is one broken laptop away from being cut off.
If your organisation is refreshing its technology this year, talk to us about where the old kit goes next.
Old tech = New beginning.