Is it possible to find a school with very little/no exposure to digital??

[OlliEliza]

My child will start reception next year, and I've just got to know that all of the schools in my area rely heavily on screens from a young age. (I'd like to keep in mind both primary and secondary schools.)This is absolutely a deal breaker for me. Is it possible to find a primary school with no screens at all, and is it possible to find a secondary school with very minimal exposure to them? What I mean is no mandatory iPads; books, and exercise books in daily use, handwritten homework, computers used for IT, research, etc.

What is going on is truly appalling for me. The only school that I've found is a Montessori school, but it's very expensive. Any luck in finding those schools?

We might sometimes play a maths or phonics game on the smart board when we have 10 minutes to spare. The children love it and they engage well.

Last week we probably did it more than normal
because SATs in school meant normal timings where off slightly and we had to keep noise to a minimum.

But do any schools actually do that? So many primaries are poorly resources with IT because it's so expensive and schools are underfunded. Classes are too often competing for use of tablets for children to be on learning games all day. They also wouldn't get through the curriculum if they were doing this e.g. maths is heavily weighted towards formal written methods. By and large, primaries are staggeringly old-fashioned. We run our school from a paper diary and still use paper registers for some purposes. I go through literal reams of paper printing things every week. It is just so far from reality to imagine children are spending more than a very small portion of the day on screens.

Your point about times tables is actually quite insulting to teachers - I use it purposefully, analysing the data from it, in a time limited way alongside the many other ways to teach maths you reference. It is one of the many ways to learn and there is no doubt children learn times tables quicker than with only other methods - this is based on teachers' professional experience and judgment over years, not just random assumptions from someone who has never taught a class of thirty.

This isn’t true. Computing is on the curriculum at Ks1 so children in year 1 will be using computers / iPads for their computing lessons. Our EYFS also use iPads for computing.

Electronic screens / whiteboards are used to teach from in classrooms and teaching will incorporate online resources for most, if not all, subjects including phonics at EYFS. Some schools use online reading programmes instead of sending physical books home.

Interventions are often done using iPads.
At year 4 the government Multiplication test is done online, our year 4s use iPads daily to practise this and have done all year.

It’s highly unlikely you’ll find a screen free school. It’s the world we live in - unfortunately.

The main question i would be checking op is whether the reading scheme is actual books or app based. One of our local schools uses an e book reading scheme which I personally think is a big mistake, paper books are far superior. For other activities you need to trust the school will use the interactive white board wisely

In Ireland but all schools use interactive white boards now, aside from that as said above newsround and here an Irish channel too, but op that doesn’t mean they’re watching them all day, and their treat is still a movie last day of term

Based on your last post, the best thing you can do is perhaps volunteer in the local school and see how they do exactly what your post says, I don't recognise the screen addled caricature you are painting, so I'd be cautious about your sources.

I think a lot of parents who feel a bit guilty about how lax they are with screen time over-egg how much schools use them, to paint themselves as powerless against this tidal wave of screen. It's perfectly possible for kids to grow up with very little interest in screens. Even at high school, everyone has an iPad but when my DCs do their homework, it's on sheets or jotters and the iPad is only used as a homework diary and then used to photograph it to submit it, sometimes. In three years there have been a couple of presentations or computer science projects using it, but that's it, the rest is all jotter based. In school there are sometimes quizzes but they are to consolidate learning, which has been done traditionally, not to introduce concepts.

😂

Apart from the Smartboard, screens are generally at a premium in most primaries and secondaries due to the cost of them. The primary DC2 is at has a set of iPads and a set of laptops. Everything is done in books/written and access to them is not much - pretty much computing and that’s it - occasionally research. In our local secondary there is minimal laptops/iPads as the school doesn’t have lots of them. Apart from computing, I’ve heard about very occasional use in Maths, Science and music for her composition (she does GCSE music.) Homework is a mix of online and written - some is more or less all online e.g. maths but some like English is very mixed. I don’t suspect it is quite as bad as you think it is. Go round the schools and ask. I wouldn’t bother with secondary yet - that’s a long way off and things change rapidly.

My friend's child is in reception in a school where even the reception year are all given iPads and use them every day for as much as they can instead of books or paper. So it does happen.

It's not necessary to use iPads from the age of 4 to develop workplace computing skills. The young adults joining my workplace as their first job who grew up with screens everywhere mostly have terrible workplace computing skills - tiktok and Snapchat are not exactly relevant or transferable to most workplaces. Lots of them really struggle.

Hopefully we will wise up and go in the same direction as Sweden. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly0vk77vdko

My friend's child is in reception in a school where even the reception year are all given iPads and use them every day for as much as they can instead of books or paper. So it does happen.

A state school in the UK? Where is the magical place that can afford to give every child an iPad whilst most can't afford glue sticks.

Yes a state school in the UK.

They make the parents buy them.

State schools can't make parents pay for school trips let alone iPads.

I couldn't agree more @OlliEliza

There is absolutely zero benefit to kids using screens to do homework, they'll be IT literate regardless through learning coding etc. Screens do so much harm.

Policy for a school near me

That’s interesting about the high school you’re referring to.
At my DS school, parents have to buy a chrome book in year 7 and they use them daily in most lessons, they do still handwrite and have text books to record in but still a lot of chrome book use. They also do online homework for loads of subjects, French (language nut), sparks (reading), Seneca (science), some maths app, Google forms for computer science to name a few. Homework is very rarely written or using a book.

My kids go to school in Scotland which is so so so much worse than what I’m reading here. I have two kids in a p1-4 composite. From p1 they’ve had their own iPads. They use really trashy gamified EdTech and to my horror i have seen my child clicking past the maths questions with ease to get on to the video game section. Child says they all do it at school as nobody’s supervising. One parent asked for a list of apps their 5yr old
was signed up to and there was 14! They also browse the web from p1 and this
isn’t directly supervised either - kids in the class have seen images of a bus crash, inappropriate fan art, dead bodies. When a few parents have said we don’t consent to the web browsing we are told they that don’t need consent and the school will continue to let them do it. Why are young kids needing to browse the internet ?

It’s not just for topic research , they are on thee iPads messing about during unstructured “activity time”, wet break times etc. They’ve all downloaded Minecraft and play shooter games on a website called “Totally Science”.

The smart whiteboard seems to have some legit uses but my kids watch Danny Go for their PE lessons and now I’ve heard they’re doing music and art lessons on it too. There’s no music teacher provision for this at all in the school, which I’m challenging at the moment.

The teacher used to read them a story at the end of each day but they now watch Bluey or Go Jeffers on the big screen.

No coding or actual digital skills as far as I’m aware. They do have little coding robots that you programme to go around tracks which are quite cool, that’s the only coding they do and it’s not screen or iPad based.

Is this all completely alien to England ?!

In our school, where children are all on iPads and edtech from p1… the PTA are having to raise funds to buy a laminator. And SEN support staff are having their hours cut. The amount spent on iPads and edtech / games / apps
makes me sick. £16 million on iPads in our local authority, was the last figure I heard. But that doesn’t cover all the apps and things…. And it will be more than that on iPads now.

Honestly it sounds completely alien to me and I say that as someone who has worked in hundreds of schools. Utter madness. I am guessing there is not another school you can move your children to?

Not outwith the local authority area. Unless we upsticks and move. Our local authority so seem to be particularly …. extreme / irresponsible!

Are you sure?

We viewed schools this year as my son starts in September. All the primary schools we saw said that it was in the curriculum for them to use technology from year 1, and all of them used iPads from reception to start building digital skills. Coding is also in the curriculum from yr1 and there's no way that schools are teaching that without using computers...

I’ve no issue with older kids learning genuine digital skills on a laptops. But why 4 year olds need to be on iPads is beyond me. You can’t even type on an iPad. What meaningful digital skills are they learning? These devices are engineered to be intuitive and addictive anyway. I only got a smartphone aged 33 and I’ve picked it up okay! Playing on gamified apps doesn’t seem to translate into meaningful computational understanding.

and this business about preparing the young children for the world of work. I don’t know any workplaces that use gamified software on iPads…..

But most Reception classes aren't on iPads. My daughter is at an unusually well-resourced school and I think has been on them once this year. I covered a day a week in a Reception class for a few years (recently) and didn't ever plan an activity involving iPads. The computing curriculum starts in KS1, not EYFS.

There is a MAT sponsored by Microsoft somewhere. I saw a news article about it. All the children do all their learning on their own devices and their reading scheme is all online.

Sounds like hell to me but it is Ofsted Outstanding and used as a showcase.

My dc go to really rural schools where they have issues with WiFi!

They have one set of devices to be shared around the classes and the teachers book a slot so they only use them for specific planned work. Homework is in homework books with a pen and reading books are from the library.