Despite the ongoing discourse about the constantly connected and digitally savvy youth in the UK, a growing evidence base demonstrates that there are still significant inequalities in young people's ability to access and use the Internet. There is a small, but significant, proportion of young people who do not have Internet access at home, nor have sufficient digital skills to engage online in ways that are meaningful to them. This paper presents findings from a two-year school and local council run initiative in England to provide 30 such digitally disadvantaged young people with a laptop and stable Internet connection at home as well as school support. Drawing on rich qualitative data (home and school visits; parent, student and teacher interviews), we explore the experiences of young people, parents and teachers who were part of this digital inclusion scheme. Specifically, we examine how the long-standing essentialist discourses around 'digital youth' and determinist ideas of technology and social change inform how such a scheme is perceived, enacted and experienced by the teachers, parents and young people involved with the initiative, as well as the implications these discourses have for the ways the outcomes of such projects are judged. 'An effective Internet user is someone who can use it both for entertainment, creativity, work and personal usage and anyone who can reference when and where and how to use the Internet in those different contexts'.Yet, this apparent openness was accompanied by a degree of restriction -often imposed on them by senior management. For example, at the same time as wanting students to 'feel part of the same picture', School Red placed rigid filters on the laptops, and staff often gave students specific web addresses to use for homework tasks rather than asking them to seek information for themselves:'we can't give them the freedom…opening it up takes them in all wrong directions to what we want them to achieve'.At School Blue, staff strongly believed that the project solely represented a means to help the students academically. It was especially essential as all homework in the school was set, monitored and submitted online. However, they were highly sceptical of the merits of using the Internet for social networking and other leisure activities since:

Numerous academic studies highlight the significant differences in the ways that young people access, use and engage with the Internet and the implications it has in their lives. Trying to address such inequalities is complex and the outcomes of digital inclusion schemes are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved. Therefore the hope of such schemes, that if sufficiently empowered, incentivised and aspirational the disadvantaged can use access to technology to transform or transcend what Bourdieu (1992) calls their "class of conditions" (p53), is largely misplaced. This gap between expectation and reality demands theoretical attention. Focusing on a two-year digital inclusion scheme for 30 teenagers and their families in one area of England, this qualitative study analyses why, despite the good intentions of the scheme's stakeholders, it fell short of its ambitions. Instead, our theoretical analysis explains how the neoliberalist systems of governance that are increasingly shaping the cultures and behaviours of our Internet service providers and schools cannot solve the problems they create.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of English in Education, this article reviews the journal's contribution to research and practice in the teaching of English. A thematic analysis based on close study of a sample of volumes is arranged chronologically (to show the development of ideas and practices) and thematically in terms of language mode (speaking; writing; reading, including new technologies). The article argues that the journal archive can shed light on the educational past in ways that can effectively inform the educational present and help to set agenda for the future.