Traditional pen and paper vs screens in schools. Has the Education Secretary got it all wrong?

Whilst this makes a compelling media story to grab attention in the dog days of summer, it flies in the face of the vast majority of academic and social research.

The weakest part of her argument is the one she opens with. She points to a million young people outside education, employment and training and presents them as the product of an exam system built on pen and paper. That is not what the evidence shows. This is the first cohort to have grown up with a smartphone in their hand from primary school onwards, and the rise in youth inactivity has been driven overwhelmingly by ill health, particularly mental ill health, not to mention myopia or spinal issues, alongside a level of school absence that has not recovered since the pandemic.

Those are the two trends that track most closely with the numbers she is worried about, and both are bound up with the amount of time this generation now spends on a screen. If the education secretary genuinely believes that putting more screens in front of children will produce fewer young people detached from work and study, she has the causation precisely the wrong way round, and the long-term effects of the over-reliance she wants to accelerate will be felt for decades after she has left the department.

Multiple peer reviewed studies demonstrate the importance of pen and paper learning. On writing by hand versus typing, and reading on paper versus on screen, the research consistently finds better retention and deeper comprehension when pupils are not working through a device. Around a million pupils in England already spend every lesson on a one-to-one device, part of an explosion in classroom technology that has taken place with remarkably little evidence that it improves results. If the education secretary wants to fix a mismatch between school and the modern economy, the answer is not to accelerate a shift that the evidence does not support.

There is also a fairness problem the education secretary should recognise, because it echoes exactly the argument she makes about the straitjacket of academic learning. Independent schools were the first to fill classrooms with devices. They are now among the first to quietly reverse course, ditching screens in order to bring back exercise books and handwritten work, because their own experience told them heavy reliance on screens was not delivering what it promised.

State schools do not have the financial resources to easily change course. Once they set off down a path, it is much harder for them to sink the cost and admit they are wrong.

Putting more GCSEs and A-levels on screen, now being piloted, would entrench that divide rather than close it, at the exact moment the part of the sector with the most freedom to choose is moving away from it.

None of this is an argument against technology in schools, used well and used selectively. It is an argument against treating pen and paper as the problem, when the evidence points to it being one of the more effective tools for proper education, in line with reams of scientific research relating to the development of the brain.

Before ministers redesign lessons and exams around the lazy assumption that more screens equals more good, they should ask why the schools with the deepest experience of screens are the ones quietly walking back.

____________________

Jane Rowland is the co-founder of the organisation SafeScreens.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk