Tesco Computers for Schools

Don't get me wrong - as an IT teacher I'm grateful for any support given to schools by industry and I've been taking advantage of Tesco's Computers for Schools scheme for years.

Did you know however of the following?

• You have to spend over £210,000 at Tesco before a school has enough vouchers to buy just one good quality computer.
• Vouchers are worth anything from 3.2p to 0.8p each depending on what schools spend them on.
• It takes 2½ minutes to count, put the right way round and fasten 100 vouchers. That's 9 hours of counting for that computer!
• You need 12,100 vouchers for the lowest cost computer
• If you mail vouchers to the school then the stamps you use will be worth more than the vouchers

Now it seems to me that Tesco could save themselves a lot of money printing vouchers and schools a lot of time counting them if people simply associated their local school with their Tesco card and Tesco automatically donated the vouchers electronically. Stores could display what each school has received and parents could check online at Tesco.com to see progress. As it stands this scheme adds yet another time wasting task to overworked teachers.