A Risky Social Experiment

Scotland, late 2020. Covid-19 and the closure of schools had disrupted education and obliterated the yearly exam schedule. Uptake of online education had proved patchy at best. The government and the education authorities were worried about the effect on social inequalities: that children whose families lacked the technology at access online lessons, would suffer deepening disadvantages as a result.
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So, every child over about age 8 was given an iPad to use at home and at school. Teachers could set classroom tasks and homework digitally, and every child would have the tools to access online lessons if ever schools had to lock down again. The constant day-to-day use of iPads would extend everyone’s IT skills, and what with text-predicting note-taking apps, they would hardly need to write with pens on paper any more… 

It sounded amazing. Expensive, but oh so 21st-century, so technologically advanced, so sci-fi-utopian, pro-equality… for every child would have the same device in their hands. The same learning tool, the same opportunities. 

It’s 2024 now. Too soon for any definitive answers on this nationwide social experiment. It’s not straightforward to tease out which changes in children’s wellbeing have come from overall post-Covid societal rage, and which are coming from an increase in screen-time and screen-dependency.

But this is my suspicion: That if the authorities had AIMED to deepen lifelong inequalities, they could not have chosen a more effective measure to do so than to put an iPad in the hands of every child.

It sounds ridiculous, given that they handed every child precisely the same device. How could giving everyone the same item make inequality worse instead of better?

Well, to a small minority of children, you have given a high-potential learning tool that they will use to research information, store their study notes and submit work to their teachers.

To the majority of children, you have given a mixed blessing. The temptation to keep a game tab open during a lesson, to scroll required material without fully engaging, or to rush through a set task in order to grab a bit of gaming time. For practical tasks, an iPad enables them to submit a photo as evidence instead of a write-up. It feels more efficient, takes less effort/attention/time to flip through a task, select some answers and hastily re-select the correct ones without figuring out why they were incorrect. With constant and intensive teacher vigilance, most children will stay more or less on-task most of the time with iPads present… but evidence is emerging that the quality of learning is lower. 

And then for some children, the iPad is a significant disadvantage. A child with poor self-regulation and a tendency to screen-addiction may have genuine difficulty putting down their device and tuning in to spoken instruction or taking part in a practical task. Would you ask a recovering alcoholic to try and concentrate with a glass of beer at their elbow?Many times, an emotionally vulnerable child will get angry when asked to exit their game and engage with a lesson—even if it’s easy-access, sensory-based and carefully-differentiated. And, without sufficient support staff, their emotional reactions will disrupt more than their own learning. There is also the question of what may be happening outside of school hours: are some children spending less time socialising or playing outdoors, now that they have an iPad always at hand? If so, there will be physical and mental repercussions.

I asked one headteacher, hypothetically, whether a school would ever take away a child’s iPad if it became clear that it was disadvantaging their learning and wellbeing. The answer was, yes, in principle that could be considered. However, I gather it’s almost never done. The level of evidence you’d have to gather over weeks and months, the fact that most of the evidence is “soft”, small-sample, subject to interpretation, not quite conclusive, and always contestable.

But there are reasons why many parents who work in Silicon Valley, creating all this digital technology, severely limit their own children’s exposure to it, and why some pay hundreds of thousands to send their own children to tech-free schools.

In one school where I’ve worked, a P7 teacher (who is something of an IT expert himself) asked his class for their candid opinions on the value of iPads in primary school. For readers outside Scotland: P7 is the oldest class, the ones who are just about to enter high school, so they had nothing to lose by honesty. Their responses were interesting.
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Very few children spoke out 100% in favour of iPads in primary school. Several mentioned that iPads can help dyslexics or aid in spelling. Some complained that school iPads are of limited use in research because most websites are blocked (although some class members had still managed to access inappropriate material despite controls). A few children said that school was better before iPads, they got more work done, etc. The word “distraction” came up again and again. 

It’s time to begin seriously considering whether giving children iPads is helping or hindering their education and wellbeing. A huge number of children are stuck inside this experiment, for better or worse—and the signs so far do not look promising. The suppliers can say what they like about iPads “facilitating collaboration” (a claim so fuzzy, it belongs in a Dilbert cartoon). At some point, someone is probably going to sue the education system for putting iPads into schools before children were developmentally ready.

I would like to see the primary classroom made a refuge from screen-time… apart from very specific, limited-schedule, skill-building IT lessons. I believe the constant presence of electronic devices in the classroom is, in general, lowering the value of education, not raising it. I would like to see children using their motor skills, building sensory experience, developing effective learning habits. Instead of the current botch-and-flip mentality, I’d like to see children organising their thoughts on paper, working carefully on effective presentation, taking ownership of the knowledge and skills they’ve been taught.