Parent says no, stop the screen rot in schools
Bravo to the education committee for finally saying what we all know to be true: for young children, screens are like — and I'm paraphrasing here, but not by much — crack, in terms of rotting their brains and being ludicrously addictive. In its new report, 'Screen time: impacts on education and wellbeing', the committee concluded, 'The overwhelming weight of evidence submitted to us suggests that the harms of screen time and social media use significantly outweigh the benefits for young children.' In other words, it's not social media that's the problem. It's screens themselves.
So, boy oh boy, that education committee will be really angry with whoever just made this decision: from September the national statutory tests for five-year-olds, the 'reception baseline assessment', will require at least two touchscreens — one for the teacher and one for the very young child (adult and child, side by side, both on screens, just as God intended.) Who on earth thought it was a good idea to test five-year-olds on tablets? Oh wait, it's written here in small letters, let me get my glasses …It was the Department for Education. Ah.
By now, bodies ranging from the World Health Organisation to the NHS have published guidelines about screen time for young children. But these guidelines are arguably too little and definitely too late: a 2020 Ofcom report found that an astonishing 57 per cent of five- to seven-year-olds in Britain have a tablet. As a result of this large-scale outsourcing of parenting to screens, last week a coalition of schools, nurseries and colleges published a letter saying that children were now starting school with speech and emotional difficulties 'that are likely to have been exaggerated by or are even directly attributable to excessive screen time'. And yet the DfE has decided that those same screen-addicted kids should be tested on screens. And just to prove that too much screen time rots adults' brains too, I'm going to respond to this mess with an internet meme: DfE! Make! It! Make! Sense!
• Schools issue parents with screen time limits from birth to age 16
So I emailed the department to ask — politely — what it was thinking. Why was it telling parents to give their kids less screen time while telling schools to give the kids more? Alas, to judge from the computer-says-no response I got, the DfE is now run by AI, which might explain its compulsion to test kids online: 'Digital assessments reduce the administrative burden on teachers, freeing up their time to focus more on teaching and supporting pupils' learning.' So young children will get to interact with teachers more by interacting with them less. Or something.
Schools switched to digital learning during lockdown, and many found they enjoyed this easing of the 'administrative burden' so much, they never switched back. No surprise, given how much investment has been lavished on it: the UK-based primary school educational platform Atom Learning raised £19 million in 2021 and is now near ubiquitous. In April I wrote about the rise in primary schools of 'ed tech', aka education technology, aka teaching children via the medium of computer games, whizzy apps, tech portals and emojis. You don't need to be Mr Gradgrind to query the benefits of this gamification of education, teaching children from the age of five to expect lessons to be taught in ten-second bite-sized graphics. And we wonder why today's kids have such decimated attention spans.
• Book holidays with bad wi-fi to get teens reading, says Winchester head
Since then, I've heard some truly fascinating defences of education technology in primary schools. I was told that screens 'enrich students' learning experience', although when I asked if there was any proof of said enrichment, answer came there none. In fact, studies show that primary school kids experience what neuroscientists in one study describe as 'deeper reading' when learning from a paper text, whereas when they learn from a screen 'shallow reading was observed'.
I was told that it's important to teach children how to use these devices for their future employment prospects, as though the devices weren't designed to be entirely intuitive, and addictive. And in any case, they will be utterly obsolete by the time these kids are in the workplace. Some argue that ed tech isn't social media, and that's true. But telling young children to do their school projects online is as ridiculous as telling them to do their homework in front of the TV: distraction is always a click away. And my personal favourite: 'The students really enjoy it.' They'd also enjoy eating sugar all day, so let's provide glucose on tap and see how that pans out.
The one decent defence schools have for putting young kids on screens is that this is how they will increasingly be tested. Most GCSEs and A-levels will be online within a decade — so why not start them in primary school, seems to be the thinking. But five-year-olds are not 16-year-olds. One educator said to me breezily that this is simple 'market forces'. But schools — and certainly the DfE — should not be uncritical, passive consumers of tech. Mike Baxter, principal of City of London Academy, said last week, 'Over the past 20 years, schools and families have too often blindly trusted technology to aid and even enhance the education and wellbeing of our young people. However, the reality couldn't be further from this.'
I have yet to meet anyone who can explain why it's better for children to write an essay online and upload it to Google Classroom than write one by hand in a notebook. If schools can't say how any of this benefits the pupils, they shouldn't do it. Computers aren't the only thing that can say no.
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