Tesco Computer for Schools

[FN-GM]

I was having a chat today with someone and reminded me of the scheme Tesco used to run. With your shopping, you got a voucher and the schools could cash them in for computers. I remember this when I was at primary school in the late 90s.

 

I am curious is anyone else remembers and if anyone worked in a school at the time? Did you actually get anything decent? I assume millions of vouchers were needed for an actual full computer!

[steveg]

I'm pretty sure the Time and Tiny branded computers we had were purchased with those, like you say it took a lot of vouchers to buy a computer. If I remember rightly they were running windows 95 or 98 and we connected them to an NT 4.0 server. I miss those days!

[Norphy]

I was having a chat today with someone and reminded me of the scheme Tesco used to run. With your shopping, you got a voucher and the schools could cash them in for computers. I remember this when I was at primary school in the late 90s.

 

I am curious is anyone else remembers and if anyone worked in a school at the time? Did you actually get anything decent? I assume millions of vouchers were needed for an actual full computer!

 

Yeah, I worked for a school in the early noughties and the school saved up these tokens. If I remember correctly, it took about four or five years of solid saving these vouchers to get one crappy computer out of it. It really wasn't worth the effort.

[andy_b]

"According to Which?, under the current exchange rate 21,990 vouchers would be needed to provide a school with a new PC. One token is given for every £10 spent, so total spending required is £219,900."

 

We didn't bother and threw away any that got sent in.

[Dos_Box]

"According to Which?, under the current exchange rate 21,990 vouchers would be needed to provide a school with a new PC. One token is given for every £10 spent, so total spending required is £219,900."

 

We didn't bother and threw away any that got sent in.

 

I wonder what the weight of those vouchers would be per PC?

[HarryMonkey]

Yep, I remember it well. Had to be bundled into hundreds and all facing the same way. We did ok out of it. We even got a laptop one year (mind you, that was in no small way due to having a friend that worked at Tesco nudge nude).

[DrBeaker]

One place years after the scheme ended and I even started in education - we were having a tidy-up and I found a bag full of these. They went in the bin.

[jthompson]

I remember counting them by weighing them. And yes, it was something a quarter of a million £s worth of shopping Tesco to get one computer.

[Boredguy]

I hated counting the vouchers. It was always a case of after counting up the several thousand we got the "fun" of looking through the list of the RM kit we could get and normally falling short of vouchers for stuff that was actually helpful.

 

Did get some software via it though back when we used CD's

[PotNoodleTech]

I think we saved up for a year and bought a keyboard.

[MalcVolm]

You’ve got it all wrong. You don’t remember it well enough. I used to work as a Ict advisory teacher in those days. The Tesco computer in schools initiative supported to purchase of acorn computers. It was in the days of BBC micros. And I think Archimedes. It was a really exciting time in schools. These were not boring beige boxes. There was a wealth of educational software and the hardware if it was the arm based machines or state of the art. They were complaints of the time but the other educational computer research machines didn’t get a look. The Acorn range of computers with arm chips was perhaps the most most important innovation in computing ever. I had a machine with an arm one chip I remember doing a demonstration but compared a 286 machine with an old machine both of similar price it involves dragging a graphic a picture and dropping it into a document. I dropped it into impression Junior on the Acorn machine. The image was rendered instantly. I’ve ended the same on an Intel machine. It was a research machines 286 so I took the image drugs across and dropped it into word the hard desk was thrashing away and after two minutes and not joking the image appeared in the word document. This was a live demonstration and I never dragged and dropped an image into word before I was staggering how awful it was anyway ARM lives on. It’s just a great pity that acorn didn’t survive and who knows British chips British computers would’ve ruled the world wrong Intel, Dell, compac and all the other beige boxes that run windows. And we have arm chips that power all Apple computers.  Definitely a fan boy of a Acorn machines., At this time nothing, I repeat nothing compete in terms of what they could do in handling or graphics general and usability

[PotNoodleTech]

Um BBC? Archimedes?  I thinki your mistaken.  Your talking about the 1980s-1990??

 

We were  definately buying beige mice, keyboards and pcs from RM on our computers for schools one.  Must have been just after 2001 when I started?

[MalcVolm]

You’ve got it all wrong. You don’t remember it well enough. I used to work as a Ict advisory teacher in those days. The Tesco computer in schools initiative supported to purchase of acorn computers. It was in the days of BBC micros. And I think Archimedes. It was a really exciting time in schools. These were not boring beige boxes. There was a wealth of educational software and the hardware if it was the arm based machines or state of the art. They were complaints of the time but the other educational computer research machines didn’t get a look. The Acorn range of computers with arm chips was perhaps the most most important innovation in computing ever. I had a machine with an arm one chip I remember doing a demonstration but compared a 286 machine with an old machine both of similar price it involves dragging a graphic a picture and dropping it into a document. I dropped it into impression Junior on the Acorn machine. The image was rendered instantly. I’ve ended the same on an Intel machine. It was a research machines 286 so I took the image drugs across and dropped it into word the hard desk was thrashing away and after two minutes and not joking the image appeared in the word document. This was a live demonstration and I never dragged and dropped an image into word before I was staggering how awful it was anyway ARM lives on. It’s just a great pity that acorn didn’t survive and who knows British chips British computers would’ve ruled the world wrong Intel, Dell, compac and all the other beige boxes that run windows. And we have arm chips that power all Apple computers.  Definitely a fan boy of a Acorn machines., At this time nothing, I repeat nothing compete in terms of what they could do in handling or graphics general and usability

[MalcVolm]

You might be right.  BUT At the start the Tesco Computers for schools project was tied exclusively to Acorn Via the BBC Micro.  Simply because there were far more of them around  in schools when compared to RM 380z and 480.  AAnd there were loads of other 8 bit machines .machines Commodore CLC, dragon, Jupiter ace, Newbury, Spectrum,  ….. a lot.  So to avoid complexity Tesco selected Acorn machines.  That went on for a number of years, then Tesco diversified their offering to accommodate those who were not in the Acorn fold.

 

we had a new LEA “inspector” arrive.  His experience was with RM kit.  The LEA he moved to was an Acoen stronghold.  When a tranch of Government money cam along he decided we should switch to RM.  That generated a lot of infighting.  Letters from parent to the LEA complaining.  His team of advisory teachers and the head of the computing centre at the time were not in favour.  The inspector persisted.  “MS DOS, is an industry standard, it’s what the children will use in their jobs when they leave school”.  That argument won over the elected councillors.

 

And now, every day, everyone uses ARM based technology. 

Edited July 1, 2025 by MalcVolm
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[sigma]

Of course it was a completely hopeless scheme for tiny village schools who would struggle to get enough vouchers even for one beige RM ball mouse.

[Sephiroth]

I was at a small town middle school in the late 2000s and remember the death of this scheme. We had 600 students all come in with fistfulls of the wreched things and we'd count them up. We generally got a few keyboards and mice a year to replace dead or broken ones, so it wasn't all bad, but it would probably have been cheaper in staff time to just buy them new.

 

With all the fervor that came with it, I can only assume that it did peak at some point earlier, where it was viable to get a few BBC Micros or something similar.

[mavhc]

Started with Acorn, moved to x86. By the time of the Pentium Intel had caught up with ARM, at a cost of vastly more power usage. RISC OS was way faster and better, but MS moved to pre-emptive-multitasking and memory protection in Windows 95 which in the end means fewer crashes, and by 2000 an OS with security built in. Still a terrible GUI, but mavhc's rule of GUIs means that can never change

 

Obviously pointless as you're paying more in wages for someone to count the tokens than you'd get by handing them in.

[Fazza]

3 hours ago, PotNoodleTech said:

Um BBC? Archimedes?  I thinki your mistaken.  Your talking about the 1980s-1990??

Correct!

 

https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/The-BBC-Micro-in-Education/

 

Edited July 1, 2025 by Fazza

[mikes]

I remember the scheme in the late 1990's perhaps early 2000's when Time/Tiny PC's were around and you'd get a Pentium 2 with a 15" CRT kind of thing. Don't remember anyone doing anything with the vouchers though.

[hallamke]

Remember one afternoon in the late 2000's in the schemes dying days.  Arrived to find a Royal Mail "there's a fee to pay" card in my pigeon hole marked with my name.  Curiosity got the better of me and I went to the local Post Office and paid the £1.75p to collect. Turned out to be an envelope a parent had stuffed full of these vouchers and slapped a single 1st class stamp on it.  Remember laughing quite at that given the contents probably wouldn't have been worth 10p 😂  

[andy_b]

I'd forgotten what the old bbc website looked like: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/1694388.stm

[mavhc]

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers said it feared voucher schemes could worsen inequalities in funding, with schools in less well-off areas likely to have more families on limited budgets.

 

They should have consulted the Maths teachers, because £1000 difference in funding is approx nothing for a school