Teachers must think internet-first

Almost half of middle-aged, low-paid women say that lack of digital savvy is their most serious skills gap. Photograph: Amit Lennon

Last week, the CBI pressed the government to apply the same rigour to tackling long-term unemployment as it has shown to reducing the deficit. The scale of the challenge certainly warrants such a focus. In the UK, 2.46 million people are unemployed; 5 million people of working age are on benefits and 2 million children live in households where nobody works. These statistics carry a huge economic and social cost: for society and government, for families and for the individual.

Education and skills professionals are at the frontline in tackling a key cause of worklessness. This work, if the CBI is right, will only become more urgent as the UK moves further towards a high-skilled jobs market, and opportunities for those without qualifications fall sharply.

Digital skills are now vital for education and employment: we know that you're 25% more likely to get work when you have web skills, and, once in that job, you'll earn 10% more. Unison, the biggest public sector union, has just conducted a skills survey of some of its 1.3 million members. Almost half of middle-aged, low-paid women (cleaners, catering staff, carers) argued that lack of digital savvy was their most serious skills gap. Our figures show that 4 million of the 8.7 million UK adults who have never used the internet are from our hardest-to-reach groups.

At Race Online 2012, we are pushing to build a 100% networked nation in the UK by the time of the Olympics. We now have more than 1,100 partners, and many of them have worked with us to recruit a 100,000-strong national volunteer force of "local digital champions" to inspire and encourage people in their communities to go online. This is key, because peers and family members are best placed to encourage the 64% of people who say they have never been online due to lack of motivation. Other partners are working with us to remove the other key obstacle – the cost of kit – by taking part in our national scheme to get high-quality but low-cost recycled PCs to low-income groups for as little as £92. The Trades Union Congress's learning affiliate, Unionlearn, is working with employers and us to ensure that anyone facing redundancy, early retirement or redeployment in the current downturn has these vital skills.

Connecting more people with the web is a vital first step. But the close correlation between disadvantage and digital skills underscores what a vast untapped market there is for great, innovative educational tools to reach and engage our hardest-to-reach groups.

There is a large and growing body of evidence that shows that technology can transform people's experience of education. The clever use of technology lets students study at their own pace, using interactive, collaborative, conversational teaching modules, supported by teachers who can tailor their support to individuals' needs. This is hugely significant, especially for those who might have had bad experiences of the traditional classroom environment first time around.

In the UK, we have a few notable success stories of traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions that are already putting technology at the heart of how they design education for the 21st century, such as the Open University's expansion into digital with its iTunes and OpenLearn channels. We also have innovative platforms such as the secure prisoner learning intranet, Virtual Campus, whose roll-out should be a key plank of the "rehabilitation revolution". Both represent tremendous opportunities to widen access to education.

However, educationists in India and the US are a step ahead in really seizing the chance these new and powerful tools provide to tackle educational inequality. Back in 1999, Professor Sugata Mitra put a computer in a lean-to in the centre of a New Delhi slum. His experiment proved how quickly anyone could master basic computer skills, and showed that with the right content you could inspire the unlikeliest of demographics to engage with informal learning. The results were so convincing that the computer kiosks have been rolled out across the slum and into India's villages.

Technology is helping to shake up formal learning environments, too: in New York, when he was city schools commissioner, Joel Klein pressed relentlessly for people to reimagine schools for the 21st century, particularly concentrating on failing schools. The New York department of education is now embarked on a technology programme, both for education professionals to share strategies to tackle stubborn problems, and to really exploit digital learning tools to improve student attainment.

A good example of that type of thinking is the Khan Academy – a tiny education charity that didn't even exist five years ago, but has now delivered 59m lessons online. The charity grew from Salman Khan's decision to upload chatty, personalised maths seminars on to YouTube so he could coach his 12-year-old cousin in maths. The academy now has 2,100 free learning videos and a grant from the Gates Foundation.

We urgently need education professionals to connect our hardest-to-reach groups with technology. But if we're to build the skills we need for UK plc to stay relevant in the 21st century, we should go further and be bolder. This is not about wiring up more classrooms, but about rewiring our brains to think internet-first in education, so we realise the opportunity to reinvent our institutions of learning for the modern age.

• Martha Lane Fox is the UK's digital champion. To find out more about how to be a digital champion go to helppassiton.co.uk

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