it could be because the material is hard to reach or they can't reach it at all (maybe even worse if you use the school-zone to lock them in)

You can see them in the list of jobs on the school-table

"Assisted learning"
"Researching"
"Social"
"Melee"
"Shooting"
"Animals"
"Artistic"
- no materials

"Cooking"
- food like cooking

"Medicine"
- low end medicine

"Mining"
- stone blocks or steel

"Construction"
"Crafting"
- wood logs

"Tailoring"
- textiles or leathers

"Botany/plants"
- raw plant based food or plant matter

that should be it

Ah yes, I should have mentioned, I did figure it out a few hours later. Sorry and thank you!

Now I just need to figure out a way to make the other pawns leave the school stockpiles alone!

Ok ^^ you could set up zones that only the school-colonist can enter.
It is true, I would have liked to have the tables store some of it or something similar, but it wasn't that easy (and for some things like medical-learning it seemed necassary to have some balancing)

Yep, I will be trying around with it!

Sorry if I'm out of line replying to a 2 year old post, but it's the most relevant to my question so it saves me starting a new discussion.

I've currently got 2 kids learning mining and 1 teacher teaching it. 1 kid is learning as they should, picking up materials and going back to the desk and consuming them, but the other kid is wandering in the school room. When I try to force them to study, it says there's no materials... even though the construction blocks are right there, in the middle of the room, entirely accessible. There's like 70-75 in the stack as well, so definitely plenty for both kids to study, but only 1 is doing it.

Any ideas what might be stopping the second child from accessing the blocks? Thanks

Edit: Oh my god I immediately figured it out *facepalm*
When I built the second desk, I had to change the default material from steel to stone blocks.

good to know, I heared this every now and then, but it is not so easy to figure out just by the description, worst case there is also the patch so that they don't use any materials from Si-Cafe (in the main description) ^^