Instead of them learning statistics, they'll be spending a large chunk of time learning programming. The "demand in the market for Python" is for programmers and such, not psych 101 students. Your friend should expect large quantities of tears and complaints without a lot of careful work on how to teach programming to such a group. He then would have to figure out how to fit both programming AND stats into the subject.

If you want to go away from SPSS to something free, R would be a better choice for this, especially with so many psych-stats packages for R out there already, and with a good number of books or note sets for it, some used for years (e.g. Navarro's book has been around for well over 15 years, I think). It also has several menu-driven interfaces if people want to avoid much dealing with R (jamovi is pretty popular I gather).