Educational apps struggling with 'unprecedented demand'

Firefly Learning has warned that it has struggled with record demand since schools were closed last week, causing its service to run slowly and suffer periods of being offline.

The London-based provider of remote-learning tech to schools is currently used by approximately 500 schools in the UK, and says that since 20 March it has been ‘working around the clock’ to scale up its offering.

Firefly provides apps to teachers, pupils and parents to help with homework and marking. It also provides a website to each school where lessons can be planned, educational content shared, and societies and clubs run. It has more than one million users worldwide, and was seeing numbers climb.

The company offered to provide a free service to new sign-ups until the end of the school year, to help them deal with the impact of coronavirus.

The BBC has also revealed that it has had to make adjustments to the system behind its website to deal with extra traffic to its Bitesize education pages.

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