PUPILS in every secondary school of Scotland's capital are to receive an iPad for home learning in a radical new budget which would see council tax frozen despite the Covid-19 pandemic,

Edinburgh City Council wants to provide the internet-enabled iPads as part of a £8m boost for the council’s digital learning scheme.

It has already bought around 6,000 iPads for pupils, but is expected to spend £2m a year over the next four years buying devices for 39,000 school pupils. The iPads will come with internet access built-in, so families without internet access will benefit.

The devices would be for every pupil from Primary 6 up to S6.

Despite a cut in income during the pandemic, which is set to cost the council £85m, the council is set to post a balanced budget, with the help of additional Scottish Government funding and use of the council’s reserves.

The council had considered raising council tax to 4.79% – but has now accepted a £9m grant from the Scottish Government in order to keep the tax at current levels.

The council remains £5.2m worse off.

Labour vice convener of the council's finance committee Joan Griffiths, said: “We have had decades of underfunding and this year with the pandemic we got some of our costs back – but we still had a £40m gap.

“Despite that, we have managed to have a balanced budget this year. We welcome any money that comes in for the council – so when we got some additional money we were able to start looking at our priorities, which are poverty, sustainability and well-being, and what we could do to assist our citizens.

“People are really struggling – there’s people who have been furloughed, there’s people who have lost their jobs – so we really want to assist our citizens.

The Herald:

“One of things we’re doing is the £2m for digital learning – our youngsters really struggled over the last month, trying to do home learning, not everyone had iPads, not everyone had an individual device, so as a council we see that as quite a priority.”

The budget also includes measures to help low income families by putting aside £150,000 to freeze fees and charges on school meals, care at home provision and libraries.

It also plans to inject £400,000 on homelessness support and advice, £500,000 into hitting the city’s environmental targets and £250,000 into targetting short term lets through a licensing scheme and enforcement action.

As of November, over 25,000 iPads were delivered to Glasgow school children through a  Connected Learning programme, with plans for the delivery of the remaining 25,000 being accelerated in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Scottish Borders Council completed a rollout of iPads to all 6000 secondary school pupils before the first lockdown and accelerated its coding project to the six weeks before the summer holidays.

In September it emerged the  council is giving iPads to all primary five to seven children.