The UK government has pledged £78m of funding to the start-up Raspberry Pi, which sells the most popular British computer in the world. The project will train 40,000 teachers across the UK in computing education – who will then in turn go on to teach computer science to children in every school in England.

Over the next four years, the Raspberry Pi team along with its partners, STEM Learning and the British Computer Society, will deliver a programme for primary and secondary school teachers. They will provide 40 schools with face-to-face workshops and after deliver training to neighbouring schools. This will include free educational resources, nationwide training, and certification.

In other countries, teacher training in computer science tends to be bundled with other science subjects or funded through philanthropy. In the US, Code.org, a non-profit organisation, says 900,000 teachers use its resources, but only just over a third of high schools teach computer science. Code.org is funded through a combination of corporate donations and state or federal money. The UK funding is part of a £100m tranche of money announced by the chancellor in the last Budget, a per capita investment by government that is unprecedented.

Raspberry Pi is a non-profit company founded in 2008 by Eben Upton, with the aim to get young people interested in technology. They designed a $5 credit-card-sized computer that could be programmed by anyone from a laboratory engineer to a child, these are used with partners included Google, ARM and Cisco and have since sold 23m units.

Children will now have the opportunity to work on projects including Google Home voice systems, space experiments and chatbots. Technology is becoming integral to our society, and so the importance of teaching computer science is has become an increased necessity. “We have not seen anything of this scale and comprehensiveness in the world from a government, which is really exciting,” said Philip Colligan, chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.