Poirot,
I think he also received a valuble lesson in financial management and no doubt he will look after the thing. Well done.

Squeers my sons school tried a rental scheme for laptops last year and were so impressed by the outcomes that they are phasing it out. My son was elsewhere last year so wasn't part of it. This year it was only available to those who had been part of it last year.

My son has a laptop but before I was advised that the rental scheme was not available I'd planned to be part of rental scheme. Private devices can't connect to the school wi-fi and there were a number of other reasons which made the rental ones attractive.

Not sure what the answer is to the best way to manage access to computers. There are cheaper ways of doing PC's for those on very restricted budgets (Linux, free office products etc) but suspect they would be difficult to work through for a lot of those who are not technically literate and also leave students working with systems and software that is out of step with what they will find in the schools and corporate world.

R0bert

Never fear. The funds have run out anyway. Apparently our federal government - the generous benefactors of this program - didn't realise that computers are more like consumables than assets. They go out of date at about the same rate as the yoghurt in my fridge. When they are carted around by kids for six to eight hours a day, they are susceptible to considerable damage, too.

I think our government thought that, if they bought a laptop per kid, they'd have school IT covered for the next decade at least. Sadly, it's not the case.

As a teacher, I have seen some benefits to the laptop program. It's good to be able to walk into a classroom and have some certainty (temperamental WiFi network allowing) that students would be able to access pre-prepared work, be able to do guided internet research, be able to type formative written work and submit it for checking without handing over a mountain of notebooks ... yes, there are some benefits. My department photocopying budget has been spared quite a bit of pain, as well. But I'm not entirely sure that the benefits justify the cost. Students still need to know how to write with their hands, how to add up in their heads, how to locate and navigate a book ... computers have their place in schools, but they are not the 'magic pill' that can save our nation.

I think the problem really is Labor's enthusiasm for spending. We need a bit of tight-fistedness.
The laptops, Rudd's innovation, were to me worse than profligate. As Otokonoko says, they're not hardware in any enduring sense, and meanwhile the thousands of school computer labs around Australia, upgradeable, are left to obsolescence.
I think the whole scheme stinks too of the ideology of individualism, that every child needs a PC, like s/he once needed a slate, as if we can't own knowledge without owning something tangible like a laptop. The truth is that reliance on computers makes knowledge intangible.
There are of course always instances where a personal laptop is, ironically, a
Godsend, such as when the pupil's parents are neo-ludites, or think modern technology is the work of the Devil.
Unlike Poirot's enlightened classroom, I feel for those children cloistered in their parents' attics--metaphorically or otherwise--perversely on their knees in the name of education (more common than you might think).
They're rolling back the scheme at our high school too, RObert, reserving the privilege, for now, for those arbitrarily considered deserving.
It's another Labor mess, another spending spree to lament, as if nothing's fixable except by throwing money at it.
And that's why we need economic growth, btw, so we can keep on throwing money around for no good reason--though it also keeps the fat cats fat.
We need modest government spending and high top-end taxation, doing away with the need for growth--which is really only about profiteering, not need.
Labor spends so as to get a modicum of the wealth, but it really only exacerbates the problem. A laptop for every child was a token gesture towards equality--the servant drinking his master's claret.

What happened to Kevin's laptops ? Out of date already or did he only buy cheap crap ?

Philip,
Madrassahs are religious private schools ? Am I correct ?