Texthelp Software chosen to support special educational needs in Becta Home Access contract

July 30, 2009 - PRLog -- Becta has recently awarded a contract to Insight Direct (UK) to provide assistive technologies on all its Home Access packages when the scheme goes national later this year. Home Access is a government programme managed by Becta. It aims to ensure that more children in state-maintained education in England have access to technology at home to support learning. To ensure that all learners are catered for, regardless of their individual needs, all the packages available under the programme will come pre-loaded with a suite of assistive technology software. This has benefits not only for learners, but for their families too.

Texthelp’s Read&Write Home Access Version has been chosen as the leading assistive technology software solution to support the needs of learners who have reading and writing difficulties.
The Read&Write Home Access Solution provides children and families with access tools such as text-to-speech, a phonetic talking spell checker, homophone support, a talking dictionary, and output to a sound file. The software will provide much independence and support in the Home environment.

The contract to install and manage the distribution of the licenses on behalf of software publishers has been awarded to Insight Direct (UK).   Insight took part in a mini-competition run under the EU compliant Buying Solutions Framework for educational software.  

Alan York, Head of Accreditation, Becta says:

“Running this competition as part of the Home Access programme has allowed us to not only make significant savings on the software prices, but also secure access to the software suite for up to 250,000 learners. This provides all grant funded learners and their families with a range of tools to support them with their learning.

“It’s also important that the benefits of this software suite are available to all learners, whether eligible for a grant or not.  Therefore this software suite will also be available to those not currently covered under the Home Access grant scheme, providing access to the same packages at a significantly reduced price.”

Mark McCusker, CEO, Texthelp Systems adds “We are delighted to work with Becta and Insight Direct (UK) on this Home Access initiative supporting so many home learners with a variety of needs. Texthelp continues to provide innovative software solutions and literary support for those with dyslexia and literacy difficulties throughout Education and the Workplace.”

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Texthelp Systems Ltd is the worldwide leader of literacy software solutions.

The premier Education product is Read&Write. Read&Write is a literacy support tool to help those with reading and writing difficulties.