Edinburgh students will get 39,000 iPads as part of a new school initiative

Australian School child using an iPad (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

Students in Edinburgh, Scotland are getting 39,000 iPads.
The iPads are part of a 1:1 deployment as part of a £17.6 million project.

Students in Edinburgh, Scotland are set to receive an iPad of their very own as part of a new initiative costing £17.6 million or around $24 million.

Part of the "Edinburgh Learns for Life" and first reported by MacRumors, the announcement was made by the local council as part of an initiative involving ICT services provider CGI.

The 1:1 roll out, being carried out in partnership with the City of Edinburgh Council's ICT services provider CGI, will start from September thanks to a £17.6m boost to learning and teaching. In addition to the personal distribution additional iPads will be also be issued to P1 to P5 year groups on an agreed ratio.

The program will see 27,000 new iPads handed out while 12,000 refreshed iPads will also be part of the rollout alongside expanded wireless connectivity support in school.

Key elements of the Empowered Learning programme, which will see a phased roll out of all the devices completed by the end of 2022, include: 27,000 new iPads being issued to pupils/staff, refreshed iPads for up to 12,000 pupils/staff and expanding the wireless connectivity in schools by providing wireless access points and a comprehensive programme of professional learning for teachers.

The report doesn't go into details about which iPads will be handed out but we can only hope someone has been reading about which is the best iPad for students.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.