Kent school rolls out iPads to 1,400 pupils

Longfield Academy shells out more than £800,000 on school-wide tablet deployment

The iPad's march into the mainstream market continues with news of the first school-wide deployment.

Longfield Academy in Kent is equipping its 1,400 pupils with Apple's tablet device in September, in a move it claims will "revolutionise learning".

According to the Metro newspaper, the order came to £806,400.

Parents can buy their child's device outright for £576 or pay a monthly donation of £16 over three years, after which it will cease to belong to the school.

The announcement comes after analyst IDC hoisted its 2011 global tablet shipment forecast from 50.4 million to 53.5 million.

Roger Hockaday, EMEA marketing director at wireless LAN vendor Aruba, predicted that many other institutions will be keeping an eye on the rollout.

He also issued schools with a warning about the bandwidth-hungry nature of tablets.

"Before taking the decision to follow in Longfield Academy's footsteps, it is important for schools to recognise that iPads run bandwidth-hungry multimedia applications in a way that laptops simply do not," he said. "In high-density environments, such devices absolutely demand a truly pervasive, high-performance network."