News media in Australia is beginning to respond to various state government plans to drastically decrease the amount of time that school students are allowed to spend on digital devices each day. This follows in the wake of the Swedish governments ‘Från skärm till pärm’ policy a few years ago.
Here are some long comments that I gave to a journalist on this story:
Q: What are the reasons for the Australian government’s desire to pursue a ‘digital detox’ in schools
In short, this is likely to be a response that is popular with the general public. This is a policy move that is easy to explain and chimes with the general common-sense feeling that many people have at the moment that there is too much technology in our lives.
So, banning screens in schools fits with people’s concerns around children and ‘screen time’, fears over AI, things like facial recognition in supermarkets, and a general distrust of Big Tech figures like Zuckerberg and Musk.
I’m sure a lot of schools and teachers realise that a digital detox is practically very difficult to implement and there is little solid evidence – but I’m sure that majority of voters welcome the idea.
Q: Is there any evidence base for this move in terms of impacting PISA scores or other education measures?
There is no real evidence that falling PISA grades, high levels of classroom disruption or any of the other educational problems that some politicians are pointing to are caused by digital devices.
Classrooms are places that shaped by hundreds of different factors – so it is always impossible to point to one direct cause.
A few years ago, smartphones were being blamed for these problems so were banned by state governments. The fact that these problems and concerns still persist suggest that smartphones might not have been the main cause. So, after our politicians have taken all these other digital devices away they might then have to start looking for new suggestions.
In reality, studies suggest that there are a range of things that governments might try to improve schools – pay teachers more, attract high-quality graduates to the profession, repair school buildings, invest in pre-school education, change the curriculum, focus on behaviour management and so on. These are all much more difficult, more expensive and less headline-grabbing action points than banning screens.
There is certainly something to be said for reviewing the amount of technology use in schools, and how our schools have become dependent on technology over the past 10 years or so – but if there is a tech problem that I’d like to see addressed then it is the way that schools are dependent on clunky learning management systems, big platforms like Google Classroom, and poor-quality tutoring software. I am frustrated at how many schools are locked into expensive long-term contracts to use these systems – despite many of them being below par. Tech in schools isn’t perfect – but the presence of students’ devices in classrooms is not the main problem.
Q: Do education systems that have performed strongly (whether on PISA or other measures) attribute any of the success to non-digital learning?
Some of the countries pushing ahead with digital tech in schools include Singapore, Korea and Estonia – all doing very well in PISA and other measures.
So, if we take things like PISA seriously – and there is lot of reasons to treat them with a pinch of salt – then whether a school system is tech-centred or not doesn’t seem to be a clear determining factor.
In fact, Estonia has a policy of not banning phones in schools, and also has an advanced AI push in its secondary schools – but interestingly they don’t claim that this is a reason for their success. Instead, the Estonian government put their success down to a history of trusting schools teachers to make their own decisions, having high expectations of students, consulting with students and parents, and properly evaluating what they do with tech as they go along.
So, they would argue that their success is down to a system-wide set of factors – and that tech use is part of this, not a driving factor.
Q: Have Sweden’s ‘screen to folder’ policies led to any improvements in student educational performance yet?
Not yet – and you wouldn’t expect there to be any sudden impact either way … these sorts of changes would take years to come through into educational performance and it would be really difficult to pinpoint any shift solely to changes in tech.
What has happened so far in Sweden is that teachers and schools have faced a huge amount of work scrambling to adjust to the policy change – having been given little warning. At the moment the main lesson that we can take from Sweden is that it is extremely difficult to ‘turn off’ technology in schools at the whim of a minister. If we are serious about de-escalating the use of digital tech in schools then we need a considered, planned approach.
Sweden is now likely to have a new government – possibly with a different attitude to technology, so there is a worry that schools will soon have to reverse the ‘screen to folder’ dictates. We don’t want to get into a yo-yo situation where schools continually swing from all-tech to no-tech … I’m sure most schools and teachers would prefer to spend time working out a balanced approach – using technology where it is appropriate! Again, this is not a headline-grabbing policy, but probably a more sensible one
Q: Overall, what do you think are the value of ‘digital detoxes’ and ‘screens-out’ policies in schools?
There is definitely a need for a national conversation around how much technology we want in schools and there are definitely problems to be addressed in our schools. However, we need a steady, sensible and balanced approach. The use of digital technology is schools is not a matter of ‘all or nothing’. There are some uses of technology that are genuinely good for learning and really beneficial – and there are plenty of unnecessary, expensive and badly-designed digital products out there. The sorts of ‘digital detox’ being talked about are not really going to be of long-term benefit – we need broader discussion and better leadership in this area.
