The gap between a digital service and a digital skill
Somewhere in Lincolnshire, a GP appointment can now be booked through the NHS App. A benefit claim submitted online. A bank branch closed, its counter replaced by a web address. These are not hypothetical futures — they are the present, arriving faster in some parts of life than others, and not waiting for everyone to catch up.
For adults who lack basic digital skills, this shift is not an inconvenience. It is, increasingly, a barrier to healthcare, income, and the ordinary business of everyday life. The Centre for Ageing Better has noted explicitly that the NHS's digital expansion risks 'excluding the very people most likely to need healthcare support' — a tension that is especially acute in a county like Lincolnshire, where the population skews older and connectivity in rural areas remains patchy.
Against this backdrop, Grantham College runs a free, 15-week Digital Functional Skills course for adults 19 and over, funded by Lincolnshire County Council. Its existence is not incidental. It is a direct, local answer to a national problem: that public services are being redesigned for people who are already online, and those who are not are being left to find their own way.
What Grantham College's digital courses actually offer
The course's content is deliberately practical rather than conceptual. The five areas it covers — using devices and navigating information, creating and editing documents, communicating safely online, carrying out transactions, and protecting personal data — map directly onto the tasks that now sit behind essential services: renewing a prescription, submitting a benefit claim, or checking a bank statement without visiting a branch.
That content feeds into the Digital Functional Skills Qualification (DFSQ), a nationally recognised credential available at Entry Level 3 and Level 1 under England's Essential Digital Skills Entitlement. The qualification is free for eligible adults assessed as lacking foundation digital skills; the £24 registration fee that may otherwise apply is waived on eligibility criteria.
The course is not a standalone offering. Grantham College also runs fully funded Level 2 and Level 3 online distance-learning courses, typically completed in twelve weeks, and employer-linked Skills Bootcamps — short, intensive programmes that carry a guaranteed employer interview on completion. Together, these form a progression ladder that an adult with no prior qualifications can enter at the bottom and move through at their own pace.
The entry point itself has been kept deliberately low. In-person drop-in sessions are available alongside the online provision — a design choice that acknowledges the barrier for some adults is not only skills but the initial confidence to begin at a screen alone.
The scale of the problem nationally
Numbers help here. According to Good Things Foundation's 2024 aggregated datasets, around 1.6 million UK adults — roughly 3% of the population — are entirely offline. A further 7.9 million, or 15%, have some form of internet access but fall below Foundation-level essential digital skills: they can go online, but not reliably enough to manage the tasks that services now require of them.
That second group matters as much as the first. The line between 'online' and 'offline' has always been a simplification; in practice, there is a large population in between — connected enough to count in the statistics, but not capable enough to navigate a benefits portal, set up an NHS App account, or complete an online tax return without help. NCFE and FutureDotNow estimate this 'hidden middle' extends to some 22 million working-age adults who cannot perform all 20 digital tasks that industry and government currently regard as essential. The estimated cost to the economy is £12.8 billion per year.
Age is the sharpest dividing line within these figures. Roughly two-thirds of adults who have never used the internet are over 70. Nearly half of those aged over 75 lack the digital skills to manage basic online tasks — a demographic that overlaps almost exactly with those who most frequently need to access healthcare, welfare, and local services.
Disability runs as a cross-cutting variable through all other categories. Around 77% of adults without foundation digital skills live with a disability or limiting health condition. Close to two million disabled adults own no internet-connected device at all — and for those who do, assistive technology is frequently expensive, while many websites fail basic accessibility standards.
Income forms the structural floor. Some 8.5 million UK households report difficulty affording communications services, meaning the barrier is not always willingness or skill but simple cost. Ethnicity adds a further strand: minority ethnic adults are estimated to be up to 1.5 times more likely to be limited internet users than the national average, though this dimension is less thoroughly evidenced in the research gathered here than the others.
Why Lincolnshire makes this harder than the national average
Lincolnshire compounds the national picture in ways that are structural rather than incidental. Over 21% of the county's population live in areas classified as highly digitally deprived — a proportion that sits well above the English average. The worst-affected district is East Lindsey, where the combination of sparse settlement, older residents, and weaker infrastructure converges in a way that few urban authorities face.
The county's age profile matters here. Lincolnshire has a structurally older-than-average population — not just as a statistical detail, but as a lived reality in many market towns and villages where younger working-age residents have moved away. The people most likely to need digital skills to manage their healthcare, benefits, or finances are also the people least likely to have acquired them.
Rurality and connectivity are related but distinct problems. A resident in a Lincolnshire village may be motivated to learn and have a device, but still struggle to complete an online course reliably if local broadband is slow and 4G signal is inconsistent. The infrastructure barrier arrives before any skills question does.
Community infrastructure is also thinner than in a city. Libraries, digital hubs, and support organisations are spread across a large geographic area, and access to informal help — a neighbour, a community centre, a drop-in — is less guaranteed. This is the context in which Grantham College functions as one of the county's more significant institutional access points: not because it is exceptional, but because the alternatives in many parts of Lincolnshire are limited.
When the NHS goes digital before its patients can
The NHS App is now the government's primary mechanism for accessing a widening range of health services in England — appointment booking, test results, prescription requests, and medical records. Under the NHS 10 Year Plan, this shift is accelerating. What is not guaranteed is that an offline alternative will remain alongside it.
The Centre for Ageing Better has flagged this tension directly, warning that the plan risks 'excluding the very people most likely to need healthcare support.' That concern is grounded in the demographic pattern already established nationally: older adults, disabled people, and those on lower incomes are both the heaviest users of NHS services and the least likely to have the digital skills to navigate the App. The two populations are not separate groups — they are, to a very significant degree, the same people.
The 2025 UK Digital Inclusion Action Plan and the Women and Equalities Committee's Rights of Older People report both acknowledge older people, those on low incomes, and disabled adults as the groups most at risk of exclusion. Neither document includes enforceable requirements that offline routes to NHS services be preserved as the App takes on greater prominence.
This is a health equity question as much as a digital one. A patient who cannot book via an app, cannot retrieve test results online, and cannot request a repeat prescription digitally is not merely inconvenienced — they face material barriers to care. Whether the NHS 10 Year Plan's pace of digitalisation will be matched by adequate inclusion support remains, at this point, an open question rather than an answered one.
What actually helps — and what doesn't
The evidence on what makes adult digital learning work is reasonably clear. Four barriers consistently appear in the research — access to devices and connectivity, motivation to go online, skills to navigate it, and confidence to do so safely — and they rarely arrive alone. Programmes that address only one of them seldom produce lasting change.
What does work is community-embedded, practically-oriented, and sustained. Good Things Foundation's pilots found that partnerships between FE colleges and local community organisations are the effective delivery model — because it meets people where their lives actually are. The Centre for Ageing Better makes a related point: connecting digital learning to something a person genuinely wants to do — staying in contact with family, managing a prescription, checking a bank balance — drives engagement far more reliably than abstract competency training.
Short standalone courses are consistently described in the evidence as insufficient on their own. Follow-through support matters, and so does the availability of an in-person fallback when something goes wrong.
Grantham College's design — a progression ladder, no prior qualifications required, in-person drop-in sessions alongside online delivery — fits that evidence base reasonably well. Whether it consistently reaches the people who most need it is a different question, and one the available data does not answer.
The more pointed concern is structural. The effective model is funding-contingent rather than structurally guaranteed — Good Things Foundation is explicit that without sustained funding, community organisations cannot deliver the tailored local support on which the model depends. At precisely the moment the NHS App is becoming the default gateway to healthcare for a population that is older and more rural than the national average, the infrastructure most likely to help that population is also the infrastructure least certain to survive a funding gap.