Current status: Answered by Shirley-Anne Somerville on 10 March 2022
To ask the Scottish Government how many children living in (a) Midlothian, (b) East Lothian, (c) Scottish Borders, (d) Dumfries and Galloway, (e) South Ayrshire (f) East Ayrshire, (g) North Ayrshire, and (h) South Lanarkshire 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.
The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that all school-aged children and young people in Scotland have access to a digital device by the end of this parliament.
Local Authority | Pupils (as at September 2020) | Devices Distributed |
Dumfries & Galloway | 18,682 | 2,371 |
East Ayrshire | 16,223 | 1,837 |
East Lothian | 14,882 | 1,806 |
Midlothian | 13,458 | 1,235 |
North Ayrshire | 18,061 | 1,734 |
Scottish Borders | 14,478 | 316 |
South Ayrshire | 14,267 | 1,512 |
South Lanarkshire | 45,091 | 5,544 |