The great thing about our scheme is that it has been designed around our needs

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The great thing about our scheme is that it has been designed around our needs." The school has already transformed itself into a wireless LAN (local area network) zone - so that pupils and teachers can access a fast internet connection on their laptops, from any part of the school, without using wires. Mr Warner's pupils are eagerly awaiting the handover of the laptops in September.Gbemi Ipaye, 15, who is taking eight GCSEs, is certain that 24-hour access to a laptop computer will improve her schoolwork "I think it will make studying much easier," she says. "You'll always have your work with you, instead of having to e-mail everything to school. We've got a computer at home, but it's in the sitting-room so I can't always use it."Sarah Awa, 14, agrees. "The computer at home is in my sister's room and she won't always let me use it. So it will be good to have one of my own to use wherever I like.

It's nice and light, and easy to use, too."Estelle Morris and the charity she chairs believe that the biggest challenge facing British education is to break the seemingly indestructible link between academic success and social class. Children from the poorest homes will always be disadvantaged while 40 per cent of pupils do not have access to a computer at home and only 5 per cent of schools share their ICT facilities outside school hours, the charity says.Last year, schools received Â£49 for every primary-school pupil, and Â£75 for every secondary student for ICT The cost of leasing a laptop is at least Â£250 a year. The charity argues that, at this rate, it will take more than eight years before every child has access to their own machine.The foundation hopes to make up this shortfall, by raising money from private sponsors and by getting parents to contribute towards the equipment used by their children. At St Martin-in-the-Fields school, parents have been asked to pay up to Â£5 a month, depending on their income, to supplement a Â£50,000 grant from the e-Learning foundation. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, even from families in very difficult circumstances, says Mr Warner.However, other schools have experienced initial resistance from parents. Some parents at Thomas Tallis School in Greenwich were concerned when they were invited to contribute Â£21.67 a month (or Â£8.67 for low-income families) to provide every 14-year-old with a laptop."Some children had a laptop at home already, and some parents also thought that they could get equipment cheaper," says deputy head, Spyros Elia. "But they eventually realised that the scheme made good sense for everyone." Other parents were worried that pupils carrying laptops might become targets for muggers.Meanwhile, some educationalists are concerned that simply spending money on computer hardware could be a waste of money.

They remember the Â£250m poured into a lottery-funded ICT training programme - billed as the biggest employee training programme in Europe - which was widely condemned for failing to have any impact in the classroom. Spending money on equipment will be wasted unless teachers and pupils are well trained in how to use it, they argue."I have seen too many examples of schools spending money on computer hardware, and it just sitting there unused because the school didn't have the capacity to make use of it," says Sheila Dainton, education policy adviser at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. "Unless you are clear about how you are going to use ICT to improve teaching and learning, simply spending money on equipment is not going to help. Pledging to give every child a laptop is like giving them all a Shakespeare play - all very well, but the important thing is how you make use of it."But John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, says that teenagers are "amazingly adaptable", and that the important thing is to get the equipment into their hands as quickly as possible. "The foundation has set a superb target for every child to have a laptop, and the sooner we can achieve it the better," he says.At St Martin-in-the-Fields school, they are convinced that the carefully designed project will transform pupils' studies, and hope gradually to extend the laptop scheme throughout the school. There is no more passionate advocate for the scheme than Estelle Morris. "With the Government spending millions, this chance will never come again," she says.