A pioneering school is staking a claim to make its pupils among the most technologically advanced in Britain.

The oldest students at the Essa Academy in Bolton have each been issued with an iPod Touch. Next month all 900 children and their teachers will have one of the handheld computers, worth £149 each.

A bespoke wi-fi system, with 130 access points around the school, means that children never lose connectivity. If teachers are pleased with a piece of work, they can ask a child to e-mail it to them and, using laptops and a projector, display it on a wall or screen to show the class. They can also annotate it with a handwriting function.

But more is to come. Next spring work will begin to upgrade the school. It will have a 3-D audio visual theatre, writeable glass walls instead of whiteboards and Britain’s first zero-carbon classroom, made from reclaimed materials and generating its own heat and power.

Traditional classrooms will be replaced by open-plan learning areas with movable furniture for maximum flexibility. To help to create a culture of democracy, teachers will also have to drink their coffee and catch up on administration in spaces shared with children.

The man leading the revolution is Showk Badat, the academy’s principal, who, since arriving in January, has spent about £500,000 on improving technology. He said that the upgrades could not have waited for the new site to open in October 2011, as two year groups of children would have left the school by then.

A fortnight ago, pupils in their final year, aged 15 and 16, were invited in to school with their parents, asked to sign a contract on terms of use, pay £12.50 for insurance and given their own iPod Touch. Abdul Chohan, the academy’s director of technology, said that it brought forward parents who had never previously set foot in the academy.

The wi-fi server contains a firewall that blocks access to unsuitable websites and records images viewed. Pupils can e-mail staff but not each other, and once they take the iPods out of school, they are expected to continue using the devices responsibly and may not use them in the street.

Each one is security coded and indelibly marked. But pupils who spoke to The Times were aghast that anyone might sell theirs. “We are going to be using it in our lessons,” said Omayna Randera, 15. “We would be losing out. It’s our education.”

Students admitted to downloading games, music and puzzles but they also showed off an array of educational software. “I put loads of educational apps on it,” said Milan Gola, 15.

“A laptop takes ages to boot up,” said Adil Bhutawala, 15. “You can get straight on to Google and search for things. In my English research I used BBC Bitesize to look up the characters in Of Mice and Men.”

Pupils, who carry their iPods in a reinforced pocket inside their blazers, place them on their tables at the start of lessons and use them as they choose. No mobile phones or other gadgets are allowed. Mr Badat is convinced that the iPods will allow children to continue learning beyond their lessons and, crucially, to chose their own style of learning. He cited a Polish-speaking girl who logged on to Wikipedia in Polish to grasp the concept of direct current circuits in a physics lesson.

“Some people may consider this to be a gimmick,” Mr Badat said. “It is about driving forward a potentially powerful cause about social equality.Without [technology] you cannot provide the variability you need to make an experience for children personal.”

Over time, his aim is to develop a video library of lessons that students who do not understand certain elements could download as podcasts. This will not, however, be at the expense of books, and the £19 million development, funded by the Government programme Building Schools for the Future, includes a traditional library. Mr Badat is also spending £100,000 to replace all the academy’s books.

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