Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The Government is determined to ensure that all students have the opportunity to acquire good information technology, IT, skills that will stand to them throughout their lives. Equally, we are committed to realising the potential of information and communication technology, ICT, to improve the educational experience across the broad range of subjects taught in our schools.

The investment of €185 million in the schools' ICT programme from 1998 to 2006 has delivered significant improvements. The number of computers in our schools has increased significantly. By 2005, there was one computer for every nine primary school pupils, down from one for every 16 in 2000. At post-primary level, there was one computer for every seven pupils in 2005, down from one for every 11 in 2000. The National Council for Technology in Education has provided over 130,000 training places for teachers in a wide range of areas, including technical courses, subject specific courses, web use, web design and digital media courses. Through Scoilnet and other initiatives curriculum-mapped on-line resources have been made available and schools have been networked and given broadband access.

Considerable improvements have been made but we are conscious that challenges remain and have set out an investment of €252 million in schools ICT under the national development plan. A new strategy is being developed that will be comprehensive, well considered and informed by best practice in other countries. This will ensure that schools have the right package of hardware, software, training, curricular content, maintenance services and other necessary supports available to them.

The Deputy's question refers to the provision of laptops to all students, but I will take it that he means only second level students. This would be an extremely expensive development and one that, for a number of reasons, I do not believe would be a wise investment. To start with costs, ultimately the price of each laptop would depend on the extent to which it is possible to standardise requirements and agree volume based prices with vendors. The machines would need to have a good suite of software included, a good memory capacity and be small enough to be relatively portable given that children would have to carry them around. Assuming one could get all this for €500 per unit, which may well be ambitious, the total purchase cost alone of providing laptops for all 334,000 second level students would amount to about €167 million.

There would of course be other very substantial costs for items such as insurance, maintenance and networking. The issue of replacement costs would also arise as would the risk of viruses being brought into the school from home systems.

Additional information not given on the floor of the House.

It should also be noted that an OECD survey conducted in 2003 found that 87% of Irish young people had access to computers at home anyway. I absolutely accept that our schools need a major investment in computer hardware but I believe that rushing out and buying 334,000 laptops would be misguided.

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