One Device Per Child Scheme - Malta

Enter a Maltese classroom today, and you will see something educators in many parts of Europe still dream of: every child, regardless of where they come from or which school they attend, has access to their own personal digital device for education. This is the result of a national upskilling strategy that has recognised early that meaningful digital learning cannot take place without universal access to digital tools and infrastructure. 

About this initiative

The Malta One Device Per Child initiative is preceeded by its parent action: the One Tablet Per Child programme. It was later scaled up, based on the idea that digital learning cannot happen in abstract terms: rather, children develop competence by experimenting, testing, and creating digital outputs themselves - it is no longer enough to simply watch the teacher demonstrate a process on a white board. Thus, ensuring each student has access to a digital device, was grounded in a pedagogical commitment to active and skill-based learning on a national scale. 

A clear benefit is the programme's design. From the very start, each device is linked with Eskola, Malta’s national learning platform, essentially offering to students and teachers a shared digital environment where lessons, resources, and feedback could circulate continuously. Technology served the curriculum, and the curriculum was built around upskilling outcomes that can measure not only digital literacy in a vague sense, but the ability to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information in a digital form. 

Teachers are central to this work, hence professional development activities targeting teachers accompanied every phase of the launch. This methodology ensured teachers and educators understood how to structure digital activities, assess digital outputs, and guide learners through increasingly complex tasks. Investment in teachers was crucial to the programme's success: without it, there was a clear risk devices could become expensive distractions rather than aids in the teaching and learning process. 

Why is this a good practice? 

The impact of upskilling has been real and measurable. Malta now reports that 63% of its population has at least fundamental digital skills, well above the EU average of around 55%. Among the school age cohorts, the difference is even more pronounced. Maltese young people are entering further education and the digital fluency workforce which is becoming a competitive advantage for the national economy. This is further evidenced by the fact that more than 81% of Maltese enterprises show at least a basic level of adoption of digital technology.

The programme was also explicit on inclusion. Malta’s Digital Education Strategy 2024-2030 recognises that access to devices is necessary but not sufficient. Students from disadvantaged families need additional support to convert access into genuine skills. Targeted support mechanisms have been embedded in the programme to address this, ensuring that upskilling reaches those who need it most rather than just accelerating those who already have new skills.

Replicating this good practice across Europe

Each EU member state can draw practical lessons from Malta’s experience, but critical knowledge is sequencing: the distribution of devices received before the platform infrastructure and the preparation of teachers produces frustration, not upskilling. The Maltese model insists that the three components move together.

For countries in Central and Eastern Europe, access to household appliances remains uneven. The EU Cohesion Funds and the Digital Decade investment lines offer viable funding routes for similar programmes. The prerequisite is a national commitment to treat access to devices as a fundamental infrastructure, equivalent in importance to school building and textbooks, not as a technological project managed by an IT department.

Malta’s lesson is ultimately one of ambition compared to coherence: set a clear upskilling objective, give it appropriate resources, and refuse to treat any single hardware, platform, or pedagogy component as optional. That combination, more than any specific technology option, is the one that made the difference. In an era where digital competence is becoming as fundamental as numeracy and literacy, this is a lesson that every EU education system would benefit from taking seriously.