400 SA schools now connected to high-speed internet

Four hundred South Australian (SA) schools are now connected to high-speed, fibre-optic internet through the state government’s $80 million ‘SWiFT’ project.

The rollout, which currently covers over 161,000 students and 19,000 teachers, achieved the 100,000 student milestone in August last year and is set to reach 514 schools by June 2020, according to a post by the SA Department of Education (DoE).

It’s expected to help boost students’ academic outcomes by allowing them to more readily create, access and collaborate on online resources, the DoE’s website explained.

“We made a commitment to our system when we signed the contract with Telstra in December 2018 that we weren’t going to rest until we had reliable high-speed internet available in every school … and, we’re nearly there,” Chief Information Officer Scott Bayliss said in the DoE’s post.

“Every teacher and student across the state not only deserves, but needs access to high-speed, stable internet if we want to realise our ambition of becoming a world-class education system,” he said.

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