Current status: Answered by Shirley-Anne Somerville on 16 February 2022
To ask the Scottish Government how many children living in (a) Argyll and Bute, (b) Highland, (c) Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, (d) Orkney Islands, (e) Shetland Islands and (f) Moray council areas are eligible to receive a free laptop or tablet and, of those, how many (i) have received a free laptop or tablet and (ii) are yet to receive a free laptop or tablet.
The following table shows how many school-aged children are in each local authority (as at September 2020) and how many devices have been distributed by councils using the £25m digital inclusion funding made available by Scottish Government in 2020-21.
Local authorities across Scotland have a range of approaches to provision of technology in schools, including some councils who have undertaken to provide cohorts of their school population with devices using their own budgets. We do not hold information centrally on those approaches, therefore, the table below only shows devices distributed through the funding made available by Scottish Government in 2020-21.
Local Authority | Pupils (as at September 2020) | Devices Distributed |
Argyll and Bute | 10,167 | 1,317 |
Highland | 30,826 | 4.499 |
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar | 3,328 | 357 |
Orkney | 2,804 | 275 |
Shetland Islands | 3,289 | 475 |
Moray | 12,114 | 1,315 |