After more than 15 years of laptops being used in schools across Australia and worldwide, many teachers and parent groups are calling for a rethink of screen time in classrooms, with some schools already reverting to pen and paper where technology offers no clear educational benefit.
Earlier this month, federal education minister Jason Clare wrote on Facebook: “When I was a kid there was a computer room at school. Now they are everywhere. From morning till night. I think there is a good argument our kids need a digital detox.” Since then, Clare told ABC News Breakfast last week, he has been “inundated” with support from parents and teachers.
Government moves to limit devices
Clare’s comments followed the Victorian government’s announcement that it will abolish bring your own device (BYOD) programs in primary schools and limit screen use to 90 minutes per day for years 3 to 6 from January next year. High schools have been instructed to enforce screen-free learning blocks for all students. The then premier, Jacinta Allen, launched the policy in July, saying, “Less time on devices means more time learning.”
Computer use in schools has expanded rapidly. “Computer rooms” like those in Clare’s day have been replaced by a laptop in most high school students’ backpacks, touted more than 15 years ago as the “toolbox of the 21st century” and essential for equipping students with future skills.
However, the latest Naplan results (described by some commentators as a “national tragedy”) have sparked a re-examination of long-held concerns among teachers, parents and experts about unstructured digital exposure in educational settings. Research linking screen usage to student performance is limited, but a change.org petition calling for a rethink of device reliance in classrooms – citing the recent Naplan results – has garnered more than 25,000 signatures.
Global pushback against screens
This unease has yielded increasing political appetite for policy change and prompted some Australian schools to go back to pen and paper. The reckoning is not limited to Australia. Madrid’s regional government announced a reduction of tech-time in primary schools, Sweden is considering a reduced emphasis on technology in its 2028 curriculum, and the US advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens has campaigned for policy changes in LAUSD, the country’s second-largest school district. There, middle schoolers will have just one hour of screen time per week per subject, and high schoolers limited to 90 minutes per course over the week. Students will no longer take home school devices unless parents opt in. In the UK, advocacy group Closed Screens Open Minds, backed by celebrities including Hugh Grant and Sophie Winkleman, says it is “building a comprehensive evidence-based resource for parents, teachers, and policymakers to challenge the adoption of EdTech in schools”.
The idea of reducing ambient screen time in class is increasingly popular among parents and teachers, many of whom complain about the lack of ability to monitor what a child is doing on a personal laptop and fear for their ability to concentrate, think deeply and learn effectively while using internet-connected devices.
Teachers report distraction and fading attention
Jane, a performing arts and English teacher in New South Wales for more than 30 years, says since personal devices became the norm in every class, her students’ “capacity for human interaction is dissolving and their attention spans are shocking”. Two decades ago, she says, students could be shown a video, read a text, or consider artwork and discuss it for the duration of the lesson. “Now I have to change up my room and my delivery every 12 minutes to keep them engaged. Once upon a time when you studied something, you sat on it, you pondered, you discussed it, and they can’t do that because their world is just flicking, flicking, flicking, flicking … They struggle to think critically or retain any information. And there’s not one teacher that I talk to who doesn’t feel the same.”
In response to the Swedish education ministry’s proposal for a national digitisation strategy, the Karolinska Institute, one of the world’s most prestigious medical research institutions, cited studies showing that when university students had their laptops open during lectures they spent up to 40% of the time “on irrelevant things that had no connection to the teaching”. They extrapolated that for younger people, whose executive function is less developed, the effect may be even more significant.
While research has shown that writing by hand activates more neural networks than typing, reading from hard copies tends to produce better comprehension over screens, and multitasking degrades working memory, confounding factors like socio-economic status and subject and teacher specific implementation make it difficult to quantitatively measure the impact of digital device use on students’ learning. Most experts and educators agree that the crux of the issue is not just screen time, but how and why devices are used.
From Digital Education Revolution to BYOD
The rapid adoption of devices in Australian schools began with the Digital Education Revolution, launched by the Rudd government in 2008, aiming to put a laptop in the hands of every Australian high schooler by 2011. “But we know that schools did not have the necessary structures or support around [the rollout],” says Prof Therese Keane, assistant dean of research and industry engagement at Latrobe University’s faculty of education. Explicit digital instruction was scant, teachers were under qualified, and “kids were using them by osmosis”. “What ultimately happened was they were just using them to replace pen and paper.” In 2013 the funding dried up. BYOD policies soon proliferated, and these days the majority of Australian high school students have their own family-funded device for use throughout the school day.
Keane is a staunch proponent of technology’s benefits in education, believing that 1:1 device access has significant potential when done right. But between poor classroom management, gaps in the ICT curriculum, nebulous teaching aims related to device usage and “parents’ screen habits at home”, she thinks the average student is probably labouring through an implementation failure.
An international study from 2022 of the “learning time” of 15-year-old students pointed to a “new type of disciplinary problem – digital distractions”, with one in three students on average across OECD countries reporting that in most or every mathematics lesson, they get distracted using digital devices. Around one in four students indicated that they get distracted by other students using digital devices. The study highlighted that there is a place for digital learning, but it depends on how devices are used.
Schools chart their own course
Laura, who has worked short-term contracts at 10 schools across two states in the Catholic and state systems over the past 12 years, only allows students to open their laptops for specific tasks. Even then, she says, “as soon as those laptops are open, it’s message the mate two rows behind you, or in another class, look up some online shopping, play a game”. While personally owned internet-connected device use has become the default in most Australian high school classrooms, how and how often they are used is the prerogative of the principal. In Queensland, NSW and Victoria, principals are required to consult with the school community before setting device policies.
Pasi Sahlberg, a professor in educational leadership at the University of Melbourne, believes that freedom isn’t utilised well enough. He believes blanket bans such as Victoria’s incoming guidelines reinforce the notion that education professionals cannot be trusted to determine what is best for their students. He would like to see more principals consult with staff, families and especially students to arrive at bespoke policies.
In regional Victoria, principal Justin Hird has done just that. This year he eliminated Castlemaine Secondary College’s longstanding BYOD policy for year 7 students. After an “overwhelmingly positive” response from staff, Hird took his proposal to the school community. He says 98% of all parents were in favour of replacing personal devices with school sets used only for specific learning outcomes at school and not taken home. Consultation with staff suggested removing personal devices from classrooms was a “no brainer”. Castlemaine Secondary joins high schools such as Ashfield Boys High School and Waverley College in Sydney and Traralgon College in regional Victoria in substantially limiting student time on personal screens.
“[Teachers] were experiencing it first-hand in the classroom; the distractions, the students being unable to self-regulate,” Hird says. “It was taking up a lot of time and energy and they felt they were losing quality teaching time because of this distraction. There is definitely a place for digital technologies, but it needs to be purposeful and really structured, using specific programs that are going to improve outcomes in particular areas.” Hird says parents have reported that kids are spending less time on screens at home compared to older siblings with personal laptops, and staff have reported better social interactions among the cohort. Next year the policy will expand to years 8 and 9.
At private Sydney Grammar School, one of the country’s oldest elite institutions, there has never been a BYOD program. Headmaster Stuart McPherson says that while school-owned devices are occasionally used, “there’ll be no devices in the average classroom on an average day”. Like his predecessor, Dr John Valant, McPherson believes the foundation of education is human interaction. “Technology has lots of distractions. And that seemed pretty obvious from the beginning. But we don’t want distraction, we want concentration.” McPherson says he regularly reminds students that “knowledge matters and there’s no substitute for it”.
Jane says that conviction often falls on deaf ears in her own classrooms. She believes years of skimming websites, copying and pasting “and making PowerPoints” have left many students unable to analyse texts or “really think for themselves at all”. “So I have to go back and teach them how to read critically, and how to decipher and how to form opinions.” Jane insists her students work from hard copies. “And at the end of it, I ask, do you prefer this to looking at a screen? Absolutely, they say.”
