Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Computers for Schools - what a swizz !

As a parent I believe that our schools should be properly and adequately funded. As a taxpayer I agree that schools should have a set level of IT equipment though seeing as some schools barely have weatherproof buildings this may be aspirational.

However I strongly dislike promotion schemes involving token collections for schools. It seems to be a guilt-trip - if you love your child you'll buy brand X or shop in Store Y.

I was struck today by Tescos advertising for their computers for schools project. To get one Asus eeePC with 2GB storage and 256MB ram will take 9,000 tokens. That's right - 9,000 tokens or a total spend of €90,000. Expansys have the same eeePC with more ram for €285.

What hope have smaller schools in this token collection ?

Why should parents be forced down this road in order to equip their schools ?

Is this the legacy the Celtic Tiger is leaving its children ?

Posted by at 3/18/2008 09:05:00 PM
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4 comments:

  1. Des, there's a real problem with this Tesco promotion. with SuperValu also getting in on it, the time has never been better for a campaign from parents. Google noncommercial schools and ireland you might hit on a campaign I have been hearing about.
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  2. Thanks for that - the Commercial-Free Education site makes interesting reading.
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  3. vincent browne has a discussion about this the other week with a tesco spokesman, they said the spent a million a year on promoting it, the most interesting thing was the spokesman coudln't put a 'dollar amount' on how this benefited the company through increased sales or whatever, the said it was hard to quantify, yeah right, big companies like this can have caluclations and projections for everything.

    find that number
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  4. Hmm. I find it hard to believe that Tesco would spend €1m each year on something whose benefits they couldn't quantify.
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