Reboot UK: Digital Skills for the Hardest to Reach

Reboot UK is an innovative inclusion project that aims to rebuild the lives of people in poverty through personalised basic digital skills training and community-based support. One of Reboot UK's key aims is to investigate transformative health and wellbeing benefits of digital technology for people in poverty. The project follows test-and-learn principles, and will investigate potential models of support, before delivering and evaluating them in community environments, to help build effective and evidenced models that can have real impact on both individuals and communities, with the aim of scaling these more widely.
This report is a lit review of Reboot UK's investigatory work, identifying and analysing key interventions for testing. Reboot UK’s aim is to develop and evaluate innovative methods of engaging and supporting people who don’t engage with the current stock of community-based internet skills. The project targets people with poor mental health, homeless people, and families in poverty, due to their likelihood of being left behind by current digital inclusion initiatives, as well as the significant amount they can gain from increasing their basic digital skills.
Peer mentoring is widespread, and especially well-used in the mental health and prison sectors, it has a strong track-record in the support of individuals with complex needs. Peer mentoring is predominantly used for institutional and social support programmes, Reboot UK will use the peer mentoring expertise od specialist services to explore potential for scalable peer-mentoring education programmes in specialist provision. Academic literature supports the role that home access has in developing meaningful and fluent use of technology. While small-scale home access projects have had positive results, little has been done to explore ways in which home access schemes can be scaled.