Why schools shouldn’t panic about screens

In 1981, a legislative bill was put before Parliament with a title that Peter Etchells has not forgotten in a hurry. It was the Control of Space Invaders and Other Electronic Games Bill.

Proposed by Scottish Labour MP George Foulkes, the bill was a response to warnings that arcade games were becoming so addictive they were harming young people.

There are, says Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, “really interesting parallels” between the arguments that Foulkes made 45 years ago and the common arguments made today around “the impact of the screen of your choice on kids”.

Foulkes’ bill was narrowly defeated - but Etchells, who researches the behavioural effects of playing video games and using other forms of digital technology, says this history is worth remembering, as anti-screen sentiment increases.

There are currently broad concerns about the effects of screen time on everything from children’s sleep and attention to their reading habits and language development, with some schools now opting to ditch laptops in favour of pens and paper.

The Department for Education, meanwhile, seems to be sending conflicting messages. Alongside introducing a statutory ban on mobile phones in schools and banning under-16s from social media, the DfE is heavily investing in screen-based technology, such as AI tutoring.

So, what should teachers believe about screens?

We sat down with Etchells, who is a member of the expert advisory group supporting the DfE to develop screen time guidance for five- to 16-year-olds and the author of Unlocked: the real science of screen time (and how to spend it better), to find out what the research actually says, and how schools should navigate an education landscape that restricts screen use, while also pushing it.

Tes: Most adults seem to feel that screen time is bad for children, although many of us spend hours on screens ourselves each day. Why do you think that is?

Peter Etchells: Very often we don’t talk about adults in this conversation. That’s a weird gap. If you genuinely, seriously think that screen time is inherently harmful, it is addictive, why are we not having a much broader conversation about everybody’s use?

I get that it’s right and important to focus on children and young people for very obvious reasons, but we’re almost exclusively focusing on them and not thinking about this in terms of our own use.

I don’t know whether there’s an element of everybody struggling with their tech use - we all have bad habits with our phones, and we see that in ourselves and we don’t like it, so are we imposing that on everybody else? I think there are elements of that.

Despite screens being increasingly common, concerns about them are now driving national policy. How have we reached this point?

There have been worries about screens for as long as screens have been around. There were papers published in the early 1980s around video games. There was a debate in Parliament in the 1980s looking to ban arcade machines like Space Invaders for kids, because kids were apparently addicted to them.

So, we have been worried about screen tech for a long time. I would say that those worries started to accelerate around 2017. I’m not entirely sure why.

I do know that in 2017 a very influential article by Jean Twenge was published in The Atlantic, with the headline “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?”. It was the most widely shared science opinion piece of the year globally, so I think it struck a chord with a lot of people.

Then the pandemic happened, and in some ways that put a bit of a break on concerns. But in other ways, it accelerated them as well.

I remember writing a piece for The New York Times early on in the pandemic, saying to parents: “Look, don’t worry too much about screen time. This is something that’s going to be a necessity. Lean into it.”

I was really optimistic at that point that what would happen was that kids were going to be around all the time, so parents would see what they were actually doing on their screens, and this presented an opportunity to really lean into understanding what they were doing and what they get out of it. Maybe an element of that happened.

But, in reality, we saw a massive backlash against screens coming out of lockdown, when they were seen as a necessary evil. And then we saw real problems with education coming out of the pandemic, and that exacerbated our general wariness about screens to the point where they became active worries.

I will also say that I don’t think the tech companies have helped themselves in any of this.

What role do you think tech companies have played in fuelling fears?

As a researcher in this space, it has been tremendously frustrating to make reasoned arguments around various sorts of screen time activities, and then to see the tech get worse.

I’ll give you video games as an example. Video games are, I think, fundamentally good, because play is good and they are a digital form of play. But the way that video games are monetised and marketed has changed drastically over the past 16 or more years, to the point where that directly impedes the good of play, in my view.

The business model for many games is microtransactions: getting people to part with small amounts of money frequently for a new outfit for your character, for example. It used to be the case that you’d spend £30 to £40 on a game and you’d have the contained experience, and that was a great thing. Now you pay £30, £40 or £50 for the base of an unfinished game and you can spend a potentially infinite amount of money on that forever.

It’s a great business model. I don’t think that’s great for the experience of play. It is “pay to win” or “pay to play” models, rather than “play” models.

You can apply similar sorts of arguments to social media. Fundamentally, what social media is - or should be - is people connecting with each other.

It is very much not that any more. If you look at how users of the platforms are now seen as part of the platforms themselves - like part of the product, part of the commodification of it. How people are engaged with on the platforms is very different from 10 or 15 years ago.

Does that mean people are right to be worried about screens?

Part of the frustration, as an academic, is that the research evidence base doesn’t match up with the very understandable concerns that people have about the impact of various forms of technology.

But part of the problem there is that the research takes a long time to catch up. And so we get stuck in this loop of panic where concern vastly outstretches what we know from the research.

‘I get people sending me abusive emails telling me I should kill myself because I hate kids’

I understand where the concerns come from, but a lot of the time the research says that for the thing you’re worried about, the effect isn’t there at a population level. For example, at a population level, there’s no good evidence to suggest that social media causes poor mental health, which is now an almost taboo thing to say.

When I say that in the national media, I get people sending me abusive emails asking who’s funding me or telling me I should kill myself because I hate kids. That’s wild, right? This is where we’ve gotten to, because it’s such an emotive topic.

In terms of what the research does tell us about whether screen time is inherently harmful or not, is there anything we can say for sure?

Nobody has developed a coherent theory of understanding why a screen itself would be inherently harmful. I think I can say that convincingly.

I’ve seen people on social media suggest that the sheer presence of a screen is going to cause problems. There’s no good evidence that supports that, because there’s no plausible consistent theory of the mechanism.

Having a video call, like we’re having now, is screen time. I’ve got another screen up here with my calendar for the day. Also screen time. My phone keeps pinging off with notifications. That’s also screen time. Which one of these is positively or negatively impacting me? It depends.

What am I interacting with? Who am I interacting with? What’s my current emotional state?

If I’m really upset and I go on to Instagram to try to calm myself down and find some funny cat videos, that can be a really good thing. If I’m really upset and I go on to Instagram and I find something that’s even more upsetting, that’s a really bad thing.

It’s nothing to do with the screen. It’s everything to do with the way that the Instagram algorithm curates my content, interacting with my current state. If I do see something bad and I go and talk it through with someone afterwards, does that bring me harm? Maybe less so than if I don’t have anybody to talk to.

The reason why it doesn’t make sense to ask whether screens are inherently harmful or not is because screens don’t exist in a vacuum. They are part of an ecosystem that we navigate, where everything contributes to or undermines or impacts our mental health, our feelings, whatever outcome you want to talk about.

One of the things that’s challenging for teachers is that screens are becoming ever more embedded in education. So, how do you decide what’s good screen time versus bad screen time?

Very often what happens is somebody like me comes along and says, “Well, the research is mixed.” And people take that to mean science can’t be useful, and scientists are suggesting that we don’t do anything, and that is absolutely not the take-home message.

I actually find a lot of reassurance from the fact that this is a very messy, conflicted area of research, because if all the research very clearly showed high levels of demonstrable harm, then I would panic.

We’re not in that, so I don’t think we should panic.

What I think we should do is take a step back and go, “OK, what do we want to happen here?” Let’s be brave about having a vision about what modern childhood looks like in the UK, where digital technology is a part of it in the education system. Let’s stop and think about how we make that work for us.

At the same time, I really feel for teachers in this space. It feels like a no-win situation sometimes, and I think this is where we absolutely need more joined up guidance across different government departments: clarity on where we have concerns around screens, and therefore where they should not have a place in schools, and where we can see value - but be ruthless about demanding evidence for that value.

What would clearer guidance in this space look like?

Take the ban on phones in schools. I think the first thing to do is to be clear about what reason we have for banning phones. Very often it’s the “everything” reason: it’s because phones impact mental health and bullying and attention in class and educational attainment and sleep. Some of those things you can control as school leaders and some of them you can’t.

My read of the evidence, generally speaking, is that if you are banning phones from schools in the hope of improving mental health, it won’t work because problems are still going to occur outside of school hours.

I think there is a much stronger case to be made, evidentially, for not having phones on as a distraction during the school day because it interrupts learning and attention. I don’t mean that in terms of phones being attention-span-ruining machines. But if you’ve got something pinging off all the time, you are going to get distracted in class and that’s going to impact your ability to focus and learn.

The other thing that you can draw from the scientific evidence is that how you create rules around tech use can be just as important as what those rules are.

We know that co-designing rules with children creates buy-in. Generally speaking, in terms of tech use, when you create very authoritarian environments, kids will break the rules. In a more autonomy-supportive environment, they might still break the rules, but they’re much less likely to hide their tech use. And that’s important. Kids need to know that if they break the rules and something bad happens, there’s somebody there for them.

I’m fairly ambivalent about bans - I can see arguments both ways. But I don’t understand why we’re not having more of a conversation about how we support young people for two situations: one, if it goes wrong, and two, when they get to the age where they can have their phone on them all the time and have unfettered access to social media. What do we do to support them so that they have healthy experiences then?

What about technology that is designed for educational purposes? Is that always beneficial? Or do schools need to be cautious?

You have this paradox. For example, you’ve got the multiplication tables check in Year 4, which requires children to be really quick at doing times tables sums. And the way for a school to support that might be to buy an app that may have no evidence base behind it. You then say to kids, “Go home and spend time on a tablet during the week,” for 20 minutes or whatever it is, doing these things as fast as possible.

I’m not saying this as a criticism of teachers at all because I know how hard it is, but I know how, inadvertently, under pressure, because you’ve got to get kids up to speed for this test, you might end up saying, “OK, the child who’s got the most minutes this week gets points,” encouraging screen time at home for no evidential value, potentially.

Who needs to fix that? Well, the DfE’s involved there. What’s the reasoning behind the multiplication tables check and behind the specific implementation of it that’s driven a market around these sorts of apps, which come at a financial cost to schools?

It creates this disconnect. If screen time is bad, then you should reduce it or try to keep it to a minimum. But also, here, do as much of it as possible.

It’s a systemic issue where everybody has a role to play, but everybody is impacted as well. Teachers are impacted by this. This is a very stressful thing to police.

There are very specific papers that you can point to about very specific apps in very specific contexts, and you need that level of nuance to try to figure out what’s the best thing to do here. But nobody’s got time for that, right?

So then you end up talking about screens in general and get to this weird space where people start complaining about kids having too much screen time in schools, when actually they’re staring at an electronic whiteboard because that’s an effective way of communicating with them.

That’s not going to damage your kid. It’s not.

So, what should school leaders do when it comes to edtech?

Introducing tech into the classroom is not one decision, it’s a series of decisions, and you’ve got to figure out whether the cost of those ongoing decisions is worth the benefits that you perceive it will have.

That’s really hard to do at the start, but it’s OK for school leaders to say, “Here is our edtech policy. We are going to review it every year, and if next year it turns out that this has just been a complete mess, then we’re going to get rid of the Chromebooks” or whatever it is. That’s fine.

I think we need to take some of the panic and the urgency out of it, and, at a school level, ask: what role do we want digital tech to play in our school environment? Who is going to be disproportionally positively and negatively affected by that in terms of vulnerability? And how do we mitigate against that whilst having a net benefit for everybody in the school?

Ultimately, that is a really difficult conversation to have. But it’s OK to take a step back and have it.