Education – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

The widening summer gap

Last week, I explored the surprisingly complex history of the long school summer holiday and explained why it owes much more to Victorian urbanisation and changing attitudes towards leisure than it does to children helping with the harvest. This week, I want to ask a more uncomfortable question. What if the six-week summer break is actually bad for learning?

Few aspects of the school calendar are as fiercely defended as the summer holiday. Mention the possibility of shortening it and you can practically hear the collective gasp from children, parents and teachers alike. The long break has become so deeply embedded within our culture that it feels almost untouchable. Yet educational researchers have spent decades examining its effects and their findings are not always reassuring.

The phenomenon has become known as “summer learning loss” or, more recently, “summer learning decay”. The idea is simple enough. During a lengthy period away from formal education, children inevitably forget some of what they have previously learned. Any teacher who has stood in front of a class in September will recognise the experience. Skills that seemed secure in July suddenly appear less robust. Knowledge that was readily accessible has become harder to retrieve. Time must be spent revisiting old material before new learning can begin.

For years, many teachers viewed this as little more than an anecdotal observation. More recently, however, researchers have attempted to measure the effect. The evidence suggests that some degree of forgetting is not only normal but essential. Human memory is not a filing cabinet in which information remains permanently preserved. Unless knowledge is revisited and used, some of it will inevitably fade; it’s part of the learning process and I have explored this in multiple posts previously.

The real question is not whether children forget things during the summer. Of course they do! The more important question is whether some children forget more than others and what impact this has upon social mobility. This is where the debate becomes particularly interesting and, perhaps, politically uncomfortable.

Research has repeatedly suggested that lengthy summer holidays can contribute to widening educational inequalities. While children from affluent families often continue to encounter enriching experiences throughout the summer, those from less advantaged backgrounds may have fewer opportunities to do so. The difference is not simply a matter of expensive foreign holidays, despite what the glossy brochures and people’s social media feeds might suggest. A child does not need a fortnight in sunnier climes to benefit educationally from the summer break. Reading books at home, visiting museums, engaging in conversations with adults, taking part in organised activities, attending sports clubs or simply having access to a rich variety of experiences will all contribute to learning. The issue is that these opportunities are not distributed equally.

The notion of a “summer learning loss” implies that all children are moving backwards at the same rate. In reality, some continue moving forwards while others stand still or drift backwards. As a result, the gap between them widens. When schools close, they temporarily suspend one of the few institutions in society that provides broadly equal access to educational experiences. During term time, children spend their days in classrooms following the same curriculum, guided by the same teachers and exposed to many of the same opportunities. The moment schools close, those shared experiences fragment. Some children return to homes filled with books, enrichment activities and educational experiences. Others do not.

Although private tuition is often perceived as the preserve of affluent families, I actually work with students from a remarkably wide range of circumstances. While some of my students return in September eager to discuss the novels they have read, the museums they have visited or the places they have travelled to, others return having spent six weeks trying to occupy themselves while their parents worked long hours and household budgets remained under pressure. The difference is not a matter of intelligence, effort or aspiration: it is entirely a matter of circumstance.

The issue of the summer break extends beyond academic challenge. Summer holidays can also expose wider inequalities relating to nutrition, childcare and wellbeing. During term time, schools provide structure and routine. They offer access to sports facilities, social opportunities and, for some children, reliable meals. The long summer break removes those supports for several weeks. It is no coincidence that many communities now operate holiday food programmes and summer activity schemes. Such initiatives exist because policymakers have recognised that the holiday period creates challenges for some families that simply do not exist for others.

None of this means that summer holidays are inherently harmful. It is important not to romanticise schooling to the point where children become educational battery hens, permanently confined to classrooms in pursuit of ever-higher examination results. Childhood should of course include freedom, exploration and opportunities for experiences that cannot be timetabled. The trouble is that for many children, such imaginings are exactly that.

Many of the strongest arguments in favour of the long summer holiday have little to do with academic attainment. Childhood memories are often formed during these extended periods away from school. Friendships deepen. Independence develops. Families spend time together. Children discover interests that may never appear on a curriculum document. Even from a purely educational perspective, there is something to be said for allowing young minds occasional periods of rest. The challenge, therefore, is not as straightforward as deciding whether summer holidays are good or bad. The evidence suggests that they may be both.

For some children, the summer holiday is a period of enormous enrichment. They read widely, travel, attend camps, develop hobbies and return to school refreshed and inspired. For others, it can represent six weeks during which educational progress stalls and social inequalities become more pronounced. The same institution can simultaneously be a source of joy and a mechanism through which disadvantage grows. This helps to explain why proposals to reform the school calendar have repeatedly resurfaced. Some countries spread holidays more evenly throughout the year. Advocates for this argue that shorter breaks reduce learning loss while providing families with regular opportunities for rest. Others favour targeted summer programmes designed to support students who are most vulnerable to falling behind.

Yet reform remains politically difficult. Parents organise childcare around existing arrangements and teachers (many of whom are also parents) value the opportunity for genuine recuperation after a demanding academic year. Entire sectors of the economy, from tourism to hospitality, depend upon the predictability of the summer season. The school calendar may have evolved by accident, but it is now supported by a vast network of social and economic interests.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that educational inequality does not disappear when schools close their doors in July. If anything, it becomes more visible. The six-week summer holiday acts rather like a magnifying glass, revealing differences in opportunity that are often less obvious during the school year. This does not mean that we should abolish the summer holiday, nor does it mean that children should spend August completing worksheets. It does, however, require us to think carefully about who benefits most from our current arrangements and who pays the price.

The summer holiday remains one of the most cherished features of childhood. For many families, it provides treasured memories that last a lifetime. Yet it is worth remembering that not all children experience those six weeks in the same way. While some return to school carrying souvenirs, stories and new experiences, others return with little more than the knowledge that another summer has passed. If educational inequality matters to us, then what happens outside the school gates may be just as important as what happens inside them.

School’s out — but why?

Every year, as June gives way to July, a familiar ritual unfolds across the UK. Exercise books are collected in for the final time and children emerge through school gates with the exhilarating knowledge that six weeks of freedom stretch ahead of them.

To all of us, especially those of us that have always worked in education, the school summer holiday feels as inevitable and natural as the changing of the seasons. Yet the long break that dominates the school calendar is neither ancient nor inevitable; it is the product of centuries of social change, economic necessity, political compromise and cultural expectation. The story of why schools close for such a lengthy period in summer reveals much about how Britain itself has evolved over the generations.

One of the most persistent myths surrounding the extended summer holiday is that it was created so that children could help to bring in the harvest. This is an explanation repeated so often that it has acquired the status of common knowledge. In reality, the agricultural calendar was far more complicated than the popular story suggests.

It is easy to forget that, prior to the 19th century, there was no single national pattern for schooling. The existence of any education at all was patchy, irregular and highly localised. Where schools existed, their calendars reflected local circumstances rather than national rules. In rural areas, children were often absent from lessons at various points throughout the year, whenever their labour was required. Spring planting, autumn harvesting, bird scaring and countless other agricultural tasks took precedence over attendance. In many communities, children simply came and went according to the needs of the farms on which their families lived and worked. If you haven’t come across it before, I would highly recommend the podcast called Lessons from History, produced and presented by Daisy Christodoulou and Elizabeth Wells, which offers a fascinating account of how English schools developed and how the education system as we know it today evolved.

One of the most obvious and glaring errors in the summer-holidays-were-for-the-harvest myth is that the harvest took place in very late summer and early autumn, not during the height of summer. If school calendars had been designed solely around agricultural labour, the longest breaks would likely have fallen considerably later in the year. In reality, 19th century children missed school at multiple times throughout the farming cycle. What has emerged as the modern pattern of the long summer holiday owed far more to urbanisation than it did to agriculture.

The industrial revolution transformed Britain from a predominantly rural society into an increasingly urban one. Millions of people moved into towns and cities, where factories, mills and workshops became the defining features of daily life, especially for children. At the same time, reformers were beginning to argue that literacy and numeracy were becoming essential for individual advancement and for national prosperity. Throughout the 19th century, governments gradually became involved in education, which had previously been the domain of the church and charitable groups. The landmark Elementary Education Act of 1870 established a framework for widespread schooling, while subsequent legislation made attendance increasingly compulsory. As schools became more regulated, so too did their calendars, and the haphazard patchwork of local customs slowly gave way to more standardised arrangements. The rise in city dwelling helped to create the need for a long summer break as Victorian urban centres were crowded, polluted and often unsanitary. Many classrooms lacked adequate ventilation and public health concerns loomed large. Disease was known to spread readily in densely populated environments, so educational authorities increasingly viewed summer closure as beneficial to public health.

At the same time, a burgeoning middle class was developing new attitudes towards leisure. The 19th century witnessed the birth of the very concept of the modern-day “holiday”. Expanding railway networks allowed families to travel more easily than ever before and seaside resorts began to flourish. Places such as Blackpool, Brighton and Scarborough became symbols of a new culture of recreation and, for families who could afford it, summer increasingly became associated with travel, fresh air and an escape from urban life. Educational planners thus found themselves balancing multiple interests. Farmers still required flexibility, urban authorities were worried about public health and the rising middle classes began to demand opportunities for family time and travel. The emerging solution was a substantial summer holiday, something that could broadly accommodate everyone.

By the late 19th century, the shape of the school year was becoming something that we would recognise. Although regional variations remained, many schools were operating with a lengthy summer closure accompanied by shorter breaks around Christmas and Easter. The arrangement reflected compromise rather than grand design. No single committee sat down and invented the six-week holiday. Instead, it evolved gradually from the interaction of social forces.

The 20th century cemented the emerging pattern. As Britain became wealthier, holidays became accessible to an even larger proportion of the population and the introduction of paid annual leave transformed family life. What had once been the privilege of the affluent increasingly became an expectation for working people. The school summer holiday and the expectation of a family summer holiday thus became intertwined. The development of the tourism industry strengthened this relationship further. Hotels, guesthouses, transport providers and seaside attractions all adapted to the predictable rhythm of the school calendar and entire local economies came to depend upon the influx of families during the summer break. The holiday season became not merely an educational arrangement but an economic institution.

The later 20th century brought additional changes that we perhaps underestimate or take for granted. Firstly, rising car ownership expanded travel opportunities. After that, foreign holidays became increasingly common and it is easy to forget just how recent that change has been. When I was a child, I remember being thoroughly impressed and somewhat bemused by the families who went to Spain every year: in the 1970s and 1980s, it was still not common practice for all families to go abroad. Families heading to airports during the summer holidays is now so deeply embedded in our culture that if one listens to the popular press it is easy to imagine that it is virtually a universal human right.

The endurance of the long summer break has not been without controversy. Critics have frequently argued that lengthy interruptions to learning can hinder academic progress and this is something I plan to explore next week. Educational researchers have identified what is sometimes called “summer learning loss”, the tendency for some students to forget material during their extended periods away from the classroom. Concerns are particularly acute for disadvantaged children, who may have fewer educational opportunities outside the classroom. Supporters of the traditional model counter that children need time for experiences that formal education cannot provide and that summer holidays allow opportunities for reading, exploration, creativity, employment, volunteering and family life. There is no denying the fact, however, that these opportunities are afforded much more to the “haves” rather than the “have-nots”.

Successive governments have occasionally explored alternatives. Some countries operate different systems, distributing holidays more evenly throughout the year. Advocates of year-round schooling suggest that shorter, more frequent breaks could improve retention and reduce childcare pressures. Yet proposals for significant reform have repeatedly encountered resistance from parents, educators and businesses alike. The existing calendar is far from perfect, but it is deeply embedded within British society. The complexity of England’s educational landscape, with its mixture of local authorities, academies and independent schools, makes wholesale reform considerably more difficult than it might first appear.

The school summer holiday is not a fossil from an agricultural age, as popular mythology suggests. Rather, it is the outcome of centuries of adaptation to changing economic, social and cultural realities. It emerged from a society struggling to reconcile the demands of farming, industry, education and leisure. It survived because each generation found new reasons to preserve it. To a certain extent, it continues for no better reason other than the fact that changing it would be so difficult.

School Daze

Before reading any further, try a simple experiment. Think of a teacher from your school days. Not necessarily the best teacher you ever had. Not necessarily your favourite. Just the first one who comes into your mind.

I have no doubt that somebody came to you almost immediately. You may be able to picture the classroom. You may remember the sound of their voice, the clothes they wore or a particular phrase they repeated endlessly. You might even recall a specific lesson, despite the fact that years or even decades have passed since you last sat in front of them.

Now, try remembering what you ate for lunch three days ago. Chances are, you’re finding that rather more difficult. This curious imbalance lies at the heart of one of the most fascinating questions in psychology. Why do so many of us retain vivid memories from our school days while forgetting vast stretches of our adult lives?

As a tutor, I am frequently reminded of just how powerful these memories can be. Mention Latin and people often respond not with a discussion about language but with stories about school. Sometimes they remember an inspirational teacher. More often, they recall a terrifying one. They may remember little about the subject (most usually Caecilius est in horto) but they do remember the smell of the classroom and the location of the windows. Such memories remain remarkably persistent.

The human brain is not a recording device. Most of us intuitively imagine memory as something like a video archive, faithfully storing the events of our lives for later retrieval. In reality, memory is selective, reconstructive and deeply influenced by emotion. Not only is the brain constantly making decisions about what information is worth keeping and what can safely be discarded, it reconstructs those memories each time it brings them to mind. From an evolutionary perspective, the process makes perfect sense. A memory system that preserved every detail of every day would quickly become overwhelmed. Forgetting is not a flaw in the system, it is one of its most important features. The interesting question, therefore, is not why we forget so much but why we remember certain things so clearly.

One answer lies in emotion. Psychologists have long known that emotionally significant experiences are more likely to be remembered. This does not necessarily mean dramatic or traumatic events (although those are often disturbingly persistent). Embarrassment, excitement, pride, anxiety, surprise and even mild humiliation can all strengthen memory formation. School provides a quite remarkable number of opportunities for such emotions. The first time a child answers a difficult question correctly or incorrectly in front of their peers. The panic of forgetting a line in a school play. The pride and embarrassment of winning a prize. The horror of realising that homework has been left at home. The embarrassment of calling your teacher “Mum” in front of a class (actually, I’ve even been called “Dad”, which was interesting). Such experiences may seem trivial to an outside observer, yet they provoke heightened emotions at the time and hence become deeply embedded in our memory.

Teachers frequently become part of this process. The teachers we remember are not always the most effective educators. More often, for better or for worse, they are the ones who made us feel something: who inspired us, frightened us, encouraged us, challenged us or infuriated us. Emotion acts like a preservative, signalling to the brain that a particular experience may be worth keeping long-term. Even now, my oldest friend and I can remember how terrified we were of our needlework teacher when we were 13. Her favourite method of crowd control was ritual humiliation. “Everyone gather round to see how badly Ros is doing this,” is a classroom memory we will both take to the grave. To this day, I genuinely wish I had found the courage to defend my friend and told that teacher exactly where she could shove it. Exclusion would have been 100% worth it.

School provides us with a series of novel firsts. Much of adult life is surprisingly repetitive and the very predictability that makes adult life manageable can make it difficult to remember. One Tuesday begins to resemble another. Childhood is different, since everything is happening for the first time. Our first day at secondary school. Our first examination. Our first close friendship, the loss of which can be our first taste of heartbreak. Our first major disappointment. Such experiences define our narrative. All of this helps to explain why our memories of school often feel so vivid. It was not necessarily that school itself was more memorable than adult life. Rather, our experiences in school were a plethora of firsts, which our growing brains identified as key events in our evolving self-definition.

In addition to the inescapable fact that our school days introduce us to a series of first-time experiences, it is also important to remember the profound effect that experiences have on us when they happen during our younger years. Psychologists have identified a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”, one of the most intriguing findings in memory research. When older adults are asked to recall events from their lives, they tend to remember a disproportionate number from childhood, adolescence and very early adulthood. Memories from these years appear unusually durable. I have witnessed this first-hand as I have watched my parents age: both of them, now in their 80s, talk more about their childhood and their youth than they have ever done before. Researchers continue to debate exactly why this occurs, but it is a recognised side-effect of ageing and several explanations have been proposed. Our younger years are often characterised by major life transitions and significant personal development; we form identities, establish relationships, make important decisions and experience many of life’s defining moments. That period also coincides with a time when the brain is laying down new neural pathways and thus appears to be particularly sensitive to memory formation. I find this the most interesting part of current theory: many neurologists believe that the changes that the brain is going through during adolescence and our early 20s are as significant as those that happen during our first two to three years of our lives.

For all of us, education is not simply something we experience, it is the environment within which much of our identity is formed. For some people, the experience is something they never quite recover from, and a significant challenge faced by schools is managing the feelings and prejudices projected by some parents for whom school was a thoroughly traumatic experience. For some, school was such a place of struggle and of negative comparison of oneself to others that it becomes associated with entirely negative experiences. School is where many people first encounter challenge and failure and it can be difficult for some adults to let go of the powerfully negative associations they may have towards education as a result.

All adults inevitably revisit their own experiences of school when their own children join the classroom. This sparks memories and every time a memory is reconstructed, it is updated and made more vivid. The past remains alive because we keep returning to it. This process can sometimes create the illusion that we remember school more accurately than we actually do. Every act of remembering involves a degree of reconstruction and we do not retrieve memories so much as rebuild them. This helps to explain why siblings who attended the same school often remember it so differently. They are not recalling a shared objective reality: they are reconstructing experiences through the lens of their own emotions, personalities and subsequent lives.

As somebody who has spent much of my professional life working in schools, I find all of this both fascinating and sobering. Teachers rarely know which moments students will remember. The lesson that took hours to prepare may vanish entirely from memory, whereas a careless throwaway comment may still be remembered forty years later. I am painfully aware of this. Our school experiences occur at precisely the moment when our identities are taking shape, when all of our experiences are new and our emotions feel most intense. The result is a collection of memories that can remain astonishingly vivid for the rest of our lives.

Curriculum Matters

Why do children study geography but not architecture? Why do they learn algebra but not tax returns? Why is Shakespeare considered essential while countless other writers are ignored? And why have I spent my career sharing knowledge of a language that nobody speaks any more?

The more time one spends in education, the stranger the school syllabus begins to appear. Most of us can remember questioning at least one subject during our own school days. We all sat wondering when exactly we might ever need trigonometry, struggled through poetry we did not understand or questioned the value of learning about oxbow lakes and the savannah. Yet beneath these familiar complaints lies a more interesting question. Why do schools teach the subjects that they teach? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is history.

It is easy to assume that the modern curriculum is the result of careful planning by education experts. While it contents certainly are debated endlessly and frequently revised, many of the subjects that dominate the school timetable owe their current existence less to educational theory and more to historical accident, social change and centuries-old ideas about what an educated person ought to know. Few examples illustrate this better than Latin.

For much of British history, Latin was not a niche subject on the curriculum of a handful of schools. It was the curriculum in all schools. From the medieval period through to the 19th century, grammar schools existed primarily to teach Latin. The clue is hidden in the name. The “grammar” being taught was not English grammar but Latin grammar. Boys — and it was, overwhelmingly, boys — spent years memorising declensions, translating texts and mastering the language of scholarship, religion, law and government. Ancient Greek followed for the most academically successful.

By modern standards, this is downright peculiar. Why on earth did the system devote so much time to a language that was no longer spoken? Yet for centuries, Latin functioned as the language of educated Europe. Universities taught through it. Scholars published in it. Lawyers, clergymen and statesmen were expected to understand it. Mastering Latin was not an intellectual luxury; it was an essential qualification for participation in educated society.

Even after Latin began to lose its practical utility, it retained cultural prestige. Throughout the 19th century, proficiency in Latin and Greek remained one of the principal gateways to higher education and many professions. Even to this day, I meet people who remain firmly convinced that Latin is compulsory for entry into medicine or the law, when in fact this has not been the case for many, many decades. Classical education has retained its association with intellectual rigour, social status and membership of the elite, but in terms of its universality, the 20th century changed everything.

As education expanded beyond a relatively small privileged class, questions began to emerge about what schools were for. Were they intended to preserve the traditional academic culture? Or were they there to prepare young people for life in a rapidly changing industrial society? The answer increasingly favoured the latter. Science grew in importance, modern languages expanded, technical and vocational subjects gained ground. Latin was in retreat. This period of change is illustrated beautifully in The Browning Version, a play written in the late 1940s and turned into a film starring Michael Redgrave in 1951. In 1994, it was remade again in a version starring Albert Finney as the unpopular Latin teacher of ever-diminishing relevance. It is a deeply, quite agonisingly moving portrayal of a man reflecting upon a life of failure.

Today, Classics as a subject remains highly respected in the schools that teach it, yet only around 2% of state schools offer Latin and still fewer offer ancient Greek. What was once the backbone of the curriculum has become a rare specialist subject, offered to a vanishingly small minority of students. Whether one celebrates or laments that transformation largely depends upon one’s view of what education is for. Most people expect me to wax lyrical about the benefits of my subject, but I feel no need to do so. Instead, I would merely say this: no subject is taught merely for its utility. Most students will not use their mathematics beyond what they are taught in primary school, yet we still consider the acquiring of a mathematics GCSE as essential for all. The vast majority of students will not require a knowledge of the English language beyond the very basics of communication, yet no one would argue that this subject should be discontinued at the secondary level. All subjects lack a practical utility for most of us, yet all of us deserve the opportunity to be exposed to them.

The story of Latin is merely one chapter in a much larger curriculum story. Almost every subject in the modern programme of study arrived there for historical reasons that are far from obvious. Take geography. Today, it is regarded as one of the standard academic disciplines, and is included on the Russell group’s traditional list of facilitating subjects. Yet its prominence owes much to Britain’s history as a maritime and imperial power. Understanding maps, trade routes, resources and distant territories was considered valuable knowledge for a nation whose influence extended across much of the globe. In the 19th century, geography was not merely a subject about rivers and mountains; it was used to teach children about the British Empire and colonial administration. It was about understanding Britain’s place in the world. History followed a similar trajectory. For generations, the subject was often taught as a largely national story, designed in part to foster a sense of shared identity. Modern history teaching has become far broader and more critical (too critical for some), but its origins reveal how closely curriculum design is linked to wider social and political goals. The modern concern to teach our children about the sins of our forefathers is merely the latest iteration of this fact.

English literature offers another fascinating example., for the notion that all educated people should study literary works written in English is surprisingly recent. For centuries, the cultural prestige enjoyed by Latin texts far exceeded that granted to English authors. Shakespeare himself would probably be astonished to discover that generations of schoolchildren now analyse his plays in examination halls, something that we take as a given. The rise of English literature as an academic subject reflected the growing modernist belief that the nation’s culture could be explored through its own language and writers rather than exclusively through Classics.

Modern societies depend upon scientific knowledge and technological innovation, so the scientific curriculum has undergone profound changes in the classroom. Victorian students would scarcely recognise some aspects of today’s programmes of study, while many scientific ideas that were once regarded as essential have long since disappeared from classrooms. The same is true of mathematics. Although few school subjects seem more timeless, the mathematics taught in schools has changed repeatedly according to social and economic needs. Different eras have emphasised arithmetic, geometry, algebra, statistics and problem-solving in varying proportions. The question has never simply been how much mathematics children should learn but which mathematics they should learn.

Perhaps the most dramatic changes, however, can be found among practical subjects. Many readers will remember a time when boys and girls were routinely taught entirely different skills. Boys attended woodwork, metalwork or technical drawing. Girls learned needlework and “domestic science”. Such arrangements reflected assumptions about the adult life that these boys and girls would go on to lead, and now appear grotesquely segregated. When it came to teaching practical skills, schools were preparing children for highly gendered futures. The gradual disappearance of these distinctions, a process that was beginning even when I was at school, tells us a great deal about how society has changed. “Domestic science” evolved into “food technology” (an equally laughable title, in my humble opinion. Can’t we just call it cookery?) Craft subjects expanded into design and technology and children of both sexes learn technical drawing and draughtsmanship. Increasingly, schools have moved away from preparing boys and girls for separate roles and towards providing all students with access to a broader range of knowledge and skills. Hurrah for that.

Even so, debates about practical subjects have never truly disappeared. Every few years somebody asks why schools teach Shakespeare but not personal finance, or why students learn about chemical equations but not mortgages. Such arguments usually generate considerable public support because they appeal to a common-sense view of education. Surely schools should teach things that people will actually use?

This question quickly becomes more complicated than it first appears. The purpose of education has never been simply to provide immediate practical utility. If that were the case, subjects such as history, literature, philosophy, music and art would be impossible to justify, leaving our curriculum grossly impoverished. Schools do not exist merely to prepare children for their first job or their first mortgage application. How depressing would that be? Schools are tasked with introducing the next generation to the accumulated knowledge, culture and intellectual achievements of human civilisation. Hurrah for that also.

The modern curriculum remains the product of countless historical decisions and is currently undergoing yet another review courtesy of our (relatively) new government. At whatever time you look at history, the school curriculum reflects the priorities, anxieties and aspirations of previous generations as much as it reflects the needs of the present one. By the same token, subjects that seem permanent today may not appear nearly so permanent in another hundred years. Perhaps that is the strangest thing about school subjects. We tend to treat them as though they emerged naturally, like mountains or rivers. In reality, every school timetable is a historical document. Every subject occupies its place because somebody, at some point, argued successfully that it mattered.

Endgame

As I write, there is one more optional paper outstanding for the OCR Latin GCSE, albeit one that very few of my students will be sitting. By the time this piece is published, all of the examinations will be over.

For those of us who work in education, the end of the examination period marks not only the conclusion of a set of assessments, but also a kind of letting go. While we can explain, reassure, encourage and prepare, we cannot sit the papers for them. When the scripts are placed down on the desk and the clock begins its inexorable march forward, that student must go it alone. The weeks leading up to that moment are often characterised by a steady accumulation of worry. Students fear forgetting what they know. They fear difficult questions, poor sleep, unexpected illness and disappointing results. Even the most capable candidates are rarely immune. Indeed, some of the highest-achieving students often carry the heaviest burdens, acutely aware of the expectations they have placed upon themselves.

Alongside the students stand their parents. Public discussion of examinations often overlooks them, yet many experience the season as a prolonged period of helplessness and worry. They can provide revision resources, quiet spaces and encouragement, but they cannot sit the papers either. They must watch their children navigate stress, self-doubt and exhaustion and, quite naturally, absorb all of those emotions themselves.

Teenagers are notoriously good at emotional projection. Adults who work with teenagers often report walking into a room feeling calm and leaving feeling worried, pressured, angry or overwhelmed, all without immediately understanding why. In psychodynamic theory, it is purportedly possible for someone to unconsciously induce another person to experience feelings that they themselves cannot comfortably hold; rather than saying “I feel anxious”, the anxious person behaves in ways that leave everyone around them feeling anxious. Psychoanalysts have long reported experiencing sudden feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, irritation or helplessness that seem to originate in the patient’s emotional world rather than their own, and they are trained to reflect on their own feelings after a session and identify whether those feelings may reflect those of their clients.

In a similar way, tutors can become vessels into which the worries of students (and indeed their parents) are poured. A student arrives at a session convinced they have forgotten everything. A parent sends a message late in the evening asking whether their child is doing enough. Another student worries that a single mock result has predetermined their future. A parent fears that one poor performance will close doors forever. Perhaps most significantly at this point in the process, a parent accepts their child’s report of a disastrously poor performance in an examination as gospel: in fact, as I have written about before, research shows that students are generally very poor at assessing their own performance.

One of the less discussed realities of educational work is that emotional labour forms a substantial part of the job. We carry confidence when students temporarily lose theirs. We maintain perspective when parents struggle to see beyond an approaching exam date. We absorb fears that we know are disproportionate while simultaneously respecting the fact that, to the person experiencing them, they feel entirely real. During the examination season, this responsibility intensifies. Every session acquires a heightened significance and every practice paper feels loaded with meaning. A student’s disappointment over a dropped mark is rarely about the mark itself, it is about what they believe that mark represents, which is weakness and failure. The role of the educator becomes part teacher, part interpreter and part custodian of perspective.

When I worked in schools, this experience was concentrated within a single cohort. There was a collective rhythm to the year. One group of Year 11 students moved together through the same milestones, the same assemblies, the same revision sessions and eventually the same examination timetable. Their anxieties often echoed one another. For better or for worse, there was a shared atmosphere in the classroom and across the school. The pressure was intense, but it was unified.

Independent tutoring has altered that experience in unexpected ways. Rather than accompanying a single cohort through a common journey, I now work with numerous individual students, whose educational lives rarely intersect. I work across two examination boards and across all the myriad of choices that their teachers can make (hence the variety of end-dates I mentioned in my opening lines). Their examination timetables differ, their schools differ and (to be brutally frank) the quality of the teaching they have received also differs.

The cumulative effect can be surprisingly profound. While a classroom teacher may be carrying the concerns of thirty students in a single year group, an independent tutor may be carrying the concerns of dozens of individuals whose worries arrive separately and require separate attention. There is no collective narrative, rather there are multiple overlapping stories, each wildly significant to the person who is living it.

This is not a complaint. On the contrary, it is one of the privileges of the profession. Trust is not given lightly, particularly by adolescents navigating one of the most scrutinised periods of their education. To be entrusted with those concerns is an honour. Yet it would be dishonest to pretend that educators remain untouched by them. This year, it has been particularly challenging, for we have also been in the process of trying to move house. We accepted an offer on our property back in February and since then we have been playing the horrifically stressful game of strategy with agents, solicitors and some very anxious, very inexperienced first-time buyers. At last, as of this week, it looks like the deal is about to go through. Given the period of anxiety-inducing uncertainty that we’ve been through during the run-up, I’m almost looking forward to the stress of packing.

As examinations take place, many teachers and tutors find themselves carrying a quiet sense of responsibility that extends beyond any rational measure of their influence. We know that success or failure does not rest solely on our shoulders. We know that students ultimately achieve through their own effort and ability. Yet anyone who cares deeply about their work will recognise the feeling. We celebrate their successes personally and experience their disappointments personally too.

This is why the final examination of the season often brings relief not only for students but also for those who have supported them. The relief is different, of course. Students are relieved because the challenge is over. Teachers and tutors are relieved because the waiting can finally begin. There are no more last-minute questions, no more urgent revision plans, no more attempts to compress confidence-building into the final twenty-four hours before an exam. The work has been done. The papers have been written and nothing further can be added.

The weight that educators carry during examination season is rarely visible from the outside. It does not appear in timetables, performance measures or inspection reports. It is measured instead in conversations, emails, reassurances and moments of calm offered to students who need someone to remind them that an examination is important but not defining.

Results day remains ahead, of course. There will be celebrations, surprises and occasional disappointments. Yet results day belongs to a different emotional landscape. The uncertainty of preparation has ended. The long months of revision have passed. Whatever happens in August, the students have already done the hardest part: they have walked into the examination hall and faced the challenge.

Ghosts in the Machine

The last time I wrote about the professional use of generative AI was exactly a year ago. I had discovered that Chat GPT was surprisingly effective at constructing Latin sentences and was delighted that I could use it for such tasks as churning out examples of the ablative absolute. That’s about as far as I expected its capabilities to go and it already felt like a jolly useful gift.

Since then, I have made what I now realise is shamefully limited use of this quite remarkable tool. Only now am I just beginning to understand its full potential and the first epiphany has been that to experience those, one has to pay for it. Who knew? The fee is not huge, in fact I am currently working on the most affordable package which costs me £7 per month. With the work that it helped me to produce in just a couple of hours, it has already paid for itself one hundred times over.

Teachers, you must listen: if you have not already done so, make exploring the capacities of AI for resource-building a priority this summer. It will pay dividends. As this year’s GCSE Latin exams draw to a close and my attention is turned to the new set texts for the coming years, I promised myself that I would explore the possibility of using AI to generate materials. I have been blown away by what it can do.

Recently, I agreed with one of my lovely contacts that, during the summer holidays, he would give me some guidance on how to use AI to do this. Although I have started to have a go on my own, I still plan to meet with him, as the benefit of talking to someone who is much further down the road with something than you are is enormous. Simon Beasley, a fellow tutor and classroom teacher, has been using AI to generate resources, reduce workload and raise standards within his department for some time. I now understand how it is that the new generation of Classics teachers are pumping out such huge quantities of high-quality resources in their limited spare time. In my day (she says, waving her stick), I was doing so from scratch and I was pretty prolific in churning out stuff; these days, the sheer amount that my successors are able to produce is simply jaw-dropping. I had thought that they just had even less of a life than I did during my early years of teaching: I now appreciate that it is all thanks to AI.

So, what can it do and what are the pitfalls? Both questions are hugely important, because the use of AI is frankly dangerous unless you know what you’re doing. I don’t mean “know what you’re doing” when it comes to the AI itself — frankly, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, how it does it and whether we are soon facing James Cameron’s rise of the machines. I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What I mean is, you need to know what you’re doing in the subject you are asking it to help you with. Because, fellow humans, AI definitely can and does hallucinate. Ignore this at your peril.

Firstly, what it can do. I have been using Chat GPT to help me to prepare practice papers and revision questions for the new set texts. Rather wonderfully, it told me how to train it to do so. I asked it what to do and it told me that I need to give it as many examples as possible of past papers, which is no problem as I have them all: this in itself was the first revelation of being a paid user — you can upload a seemingly limitless number of files and it will read and analyse them in milliseconds. What then happens is you enter into an extended dialogue with it as you invite it to start generating what you want it to create for you. You critique its output and it learns as you do so. Even more wonderfully, it evidentially starts to develop its own instincts for what it is that you’re looking for and reflects this back to you. Furthermore, due to its capacity to “look” at multiple examples of past papers alongside each other in a way that the human brain struggles to do, it is able to point out patterns, quirks and minor changes in how the board have presented and structured the papers over the years, some of which I had never even noticed. The fact that it can do so in seconds is merely an added bonus. To be clear, it is actually generating the resources for you, right down to the fact that it can produce them as a Word document for you to download and edit. It’s unbelievable. I am still reeling from the excitement at what it can do.

Now, on to the pitfalls. There are three things that I think new users of AI need to be aware of in order to make safe and productive use of it. Firstly, Chat GPT is only as good as the instructions and the material that you provide it with. Computer scientists back in the 20th century had already developed the acronym GIGO, standing for “garbage in, garbage out”, summing up the principle that if flawed, incomplete or incorrect data is entered into a system, the resulting output will inevitably be just as flawed and useless, sometimes more so. If you’re not clear and explicit, and/or if you provide it with limited exemplars, you won’t get anything good out of your project. So far, so obvious.

Secondly, Chat GPT can and does hallucinate. I don’t know enough about how AI works to understand why, but it is the spookiest thing about it. In some ways, I guess it reflects how it is not merely a computer but a generative entity with the capacity to learn, one which mimics human thinking; humans go off at wild tangents and get things spectacularly wrong, and so does Chat GPT. Being of the capacity that it is, way beyond what a single human brain is capable of, it does so on a spectacular scale and you have to be aware of this.

For example, for my first project, I asked it to help me to develop some practice papers and questions for one of the new prose texts, which is an extract from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the tale of Cupid and Psyche. I provided it with all the past papers from previous years on different texts, it analysed the board’s questioning style and created a style guide for how OCR formulates its exam papers. After a bit of back and forth with me pointing out what I felt it had got wrong, we were ready for it to start producing something for the new texts, so I provided it with the exact lines of the text that the board have prescribed. I anticipated no issue with this, having pasted the lines directly into the chat. Yet, when we were part way through the second paper, it told me that it thought “Juno’s speech” would be a good choice for the 8-mark style question. Now, I have prepared the new texts, but I do not yet know them well; despite this, I felt sure that to my memory there was no speech by Juno in the prescribed lines. I hunted through the published version of the prescribed text and then asked Chat GPT where it was getting what it called “Sections 14 and 15” from, since the board have divided the text into 13 sections only. It then cheerfully informed me that I was right: it had made up Sections 14 and 15.

This brings me to my third and final warning about my new best friend. It is remarkably charming and winsome. It is built to be agreeable and it rarely pushes back against you. It also presents its hallucinations as facts and, when you point out that it is talking out of its proverbial derrière, it cheerfully agrees with you. There is a danger here, perhaps in the same way that there is a danger when working with excessively amenable colleagues: you can end up in serious trouble, because there is nobody willing and able to tell you when you’re getting it wrong. To mitigate against this, I have learned is to poke it and challenge it robustly, to play devil’s advocate. Otherwise its capacity for people-pleasing could be quite catastrophic.

In my darker moments, I suspect that this is how it will take over the world. With a smile on its face.

On Resilience

Today, many of my students are finishing their Latin exams. For some, the battle continues until just after half term.

Every year I have a range of clients, from those who quite enjoy the challenge of examinations all the way up to those for whom the fear is utterly crippling. Whichever way we look at the data, it does seem undeniable that anxiety among adolescents has risen sharply over the past decade across the developed world. Certainly in the 21 years that I spent in the classroom I witnessed an unquestionable spike in children presenting with anxiety; by the time I left, it was not unusual to walk down a corridor and find a child hovering outside almost every single classroom, all refusing to enter due to what they said was a fear of what would happen inside. Many parents are watching their capable, intelligent children unravel under the pressure of perfectionism, comparison and relentless digital scrutiny. In that environment, emotional resilience has become more than a fashionable phrase. Increasingly, it is an essential survival skill.

Recent research suggests that exam anxiety is now embedded in a wider crisis affecting adolescents. A 2025 study published in BMC Psychology described test anxiety as a “common form of situational anxiety” capable of seriously affecting both academic performance and mental health. The researchers found strong correlations between anxiety levels and a lack of emotional regulation in adolescents. At the same time, researchers are warning that the digital world surrounding teenagers may be amplifying these pressures. A systematic review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2025 examined evidence that connected adolescent social media use and anxiety, concluding that significant associations exist between the two, even if the relationship is nuanced rather than universally causal. Heavy or compulsive use of social media appears to be closely associated with poorer mental wellbeing, disrupted sleep, diminished concentration and heightened emotional distress. A 2025 study in Computers in Human Behavior found that adolescents engaging in more than two hours of weekday screen time showed significantly greater mental-health risks, while passive scrolling in particular was linked to higher anxiety. For pupils sitting exams, those pressures can become combustible.

The old anxieties of adolescence were at least partly escapable. School ended in the mid-afternoon. Peer judgment, so essential to teenage development, did not continue relentlessly through the evening in the form of Snapchat conversations, TikTok videos or Instagram stories displaying apparently perfect (and often misguided) revision routines. Today’s students inhabit an always-on culture, in which achievement itself has become performative. Some teenagers are filming themselves revising under aesthetically pleasing lighting with motivational music and uploading it for public consumption. This is hugely concerning: young people are not merely under pressure to succeed, they are under pressure to appear successful. This phenomenon creates a loop of continuous social comparison, the feeling that one’s worth is measured constantly against curated versions of other people’s lives. During exam season, that comparison intensifies. Small wonder, then, that resilience is becoming central to our discussions about exam success.

Resilience is frequently misunderstood. It is not emotional coldness. It is not “toughening up”. Nor does it mean suppressing fear. Emotional resilience is the capacity to experience stress, disappointment and uncertainty without collapsing under them: it involves recovery rather than invulnerability. Most especially during GCSEs, when students are expected to sit multiple examinations in multiple subjects, it is inevitable that some of those examinations will go better than others. Resilience is essential, if students are to progress successfully through this testing marathon.

Many high-achieving pupils appear outwardly successful while inwardly fragile. Teachers increasingly describe students who attain excellent grades yet struggle to cope with setbacks that previous generations might have regarded as routine: a poor mock result, criticism from a teacher, rejection from a university course. Part of the problem lies in how success is framed. Young people absorb adult anxieties with remarkable efficiency. Politicians describe education as an economic battlefield, schools have to compete in league tables and universities are necessarily selective. Employers want experience and proof of concept.

The message heard by many teenagers is stark: fail now, fail forever. In reality, life trajectories are rarely so linear. Careers zigzag and ambitions evolve, so setbacks often prove formative rather than fatal. Certainly, I look back upon most of my failures with a sense that they came good in the end. Adolescents, lacking the long perspective of adulthood, experience examinations with an immediacy that can feel existential. Failure is something to be feared, not endured.

Resilience cannot simply be taught through assembly slogans or laminated posters reminding pupils to “believe in themselves”. (Dear Lord, I wish everyone would learn to accept this). Resilience must be cultivated. While schools, of course, have an important role to play here, they have nothing compared to the power of family.

If I could give one piece of advice to anyone who is worried about their children’s resilience, it would be to normalise struggle and discomfort. It’s important to let children see our failures as well as our successes: let them observe the struggle and the setbacks, let them see you come through them. Adolescents (and indeed anyone who suffers with anxiety in the longterm) often assume that everyone else is coping better than they are. High-performing families and indeed school cultures can unintentionally reinforce this illusion by celebrating outcomes while concealing vulnerabilities. But when students hear successful people speak honestly about setbacks and uncertainty, anxious feelings can become less dominating. Resilience develops when young people understand that disappointment can and must be endured. It’s a normal part of life.

Another factor is sleep, perhaps the most neglected component of adolescent wellbeing and one I have written about recently. Recent research reported by The Guardian found that teenagers are now sleeping less than ever, with screen use and social pressures among the key drivers of worsening sleep deprivation. The consequences include poorer mental health, academic difficulties and burnout. Exhaustion erodes resilience rapidly. A teenager revising until 1am while simultaneously doom-scrolling through social media is not building academic advantage; they are often dismantling their emotional capacity to cope.

There is also a wider societal question about what precisely we are preparing children for. Education policy tends to focus overwhelmingly on measurable attainment because attainment is easier to quantify than emotional stability. League tables cannot easily capture self-awareness, perspective or adaptability. Yet employers routinely identify resilience, communication skills and emotional intelligence as critical to career success. Universities also report undergraduates struggling with independence, stress management and perfectionism. One way of seeing examinations, therefore, is as a test of those skills as well as of one’s academic performance.

A resilient teenager is not one who never panics before an exam. It is one who can panic, recover and continue. Young people need opportunities to develop what psychologists sometimes call “distress tolerance”: the ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions without catastrophising them. That capacity should emerge gradually through ordinary experiences such as coping with setbacks, navigating disappointment and recovering from embarrassment, all things which every young person can and should experience. I know it is desperately tempting to try to protec them from it, but once we understand that these knocks that life brings are an essential part of our children’s learning, they can become a little easier to bear. The alternative is that adults become so desperate to protect their children from failure that they inadvertently make failure feel intolerable: when the failure comes, as it inevitably will, they will have no resources to deal with it.

Exam results matter. Of course they do. Educational achievement opens doors, expands opportunities and transforms lives. Pretending otherwise serves nobody. But the ability to withstand setbacks, regulate emotions and maintain perspective may matter even more in the long term. A young person who learns resilience acquires something more durable than a high grade: the confidence that difficult experiences can be survived. And that may well prove to be the most important lesson that their education can offer them.

Cropped version of a photo by Zohre Nemati on Unsplash

Babies and bathwater

A recent study reported in the press this week has apparently found that strict bans on mobile phones in schools have “close to zero” impact on student learning and show no evidence of improvements in attendance or online bullying. If we take such findings at face value and conclude that school phone bans are like to be ineffective, we are not only misreading the data but also misunderstanding the purpose of removing smart phones from our schools. The crucial point is not whether removing phones from the classroom instantly boosts results or turns around behaviour in schools that have problems; it is that schools have an opportunity to model healthier norms and support families in standing against what has become a tidal wave of addiction for the next generation.

The recent study cited in headlines found minimal measurable differences in academic outcomes or attendance between schools that banned phones and those that did not. Yet even the researchers themselves cautioned against interpreting this as evidence that bans are pointless. This is because educational outcomes (such as grades and attendance) are blunt instruments for measuring complex behavioural and psychological phenomena. Countless variables such as family life, socioeconomic conditions, prior attainment and curriculum quality cannot be neutralised simply by removing a device during school hours. Expecting a ban to produce immediate, measurable improvements is akin to expecting a single dietary change to transform long-term health overnight: I am currently trying to reduce my LDL cholesterol levels, and I don’t expect to see results in less than six months, nor do I necessarily expect to see them at all, as my high cholesterol may be genetic. (I strongly suspect, however, that my genetic inheritance might be a love of cheese rather than a fault in my liver’s ability to process lipids).

To understand why it is a good idea to remove smart phones from the school enviornment, let’s look at the broader research on smartphone use and adolescent wellbeing. A growing body of evidence points to significant associations between problematic smartphone use and mental health difficulties. For instance, research funded by the NIHR found that teenagers exhibiting problematic smartphone behaviours were twice as likely to experience anxiety and significantly more likely to suffer from depression and insomnia . Importantly, this research distinguishes between mere “screen time” and patterns of use that resemble addiction in the form of compulsive checking, distress when separated from the device and displacement or even rejection of other meaningful activities in favour of the device. It is this compulsive, immersive use that appears to be most harmful to young minds.

Other studies reinforce this pattern. Reviews of digital media use consistently show associations between heavy engagement and increased symptoms of anxiety, depression and isolation, while clinical research links intensive social media use even with suicidal ideation. Longitudinal studies suggest that adolescents with increasingly addictive patterns of screen use are two to three times more likely to develop suicidal thoughts over time. These findings are not trivial. They point to a behavioural ecosystem in which smartphones are not neutral tools but powerful, psychologically immersive experiences that can shape mood, identity, and social experience.

Government-commissioned reviews have noted concerns about severe harms including bullying-related distress and premature death among young people in digital environments. Parliament has examined evidence that cyberbullying via smartphones can lead to self-injurious behaviour and suicidal ideation. While causation is complex and multifactorial, coroners’ reports in the UK have increasingly referenced online experiences, including exposure to harmful content and sustained digital harassment, as contributing factors in youth suicides. Most famously thanks to her grieving father’s tireless campaigning, Molly Russell’s death was linked directly by the coroner to “the negative effects of online content”. It would be irresponsible to ignore this accumulating body of concern simply because a short-term study fails to detect immediate improvements in outcomes.

Moreover, the effects of smartphones extend beyond mental health into the texture of daily life. Young people now spend several hours a day on their devices, often displacing sleep, face-to-face interaction, and focused attention. Many platforms, driven by algorithms optimised for engagement, deliberately encourage habitual checking and prolonged use, creating feedback loops that are difficult for adolescents to regulate: frankly, they are difficult for adults to regulate. I chose to step away from social media entirely for personal use and the platforms I maintain for business I have removed from my phone, so that I can only look at them on a laptop: this helps to mitigate against their addictive nature, which is palpable and undeniable. The addictive design of social media platforms is driving a broader shift in how young people experience boredom, social interaction and cognitive effort. Schools, as institutions dedicated to learning and development, cannot simply ignore this shift, indeed they are experiencing the fallout firsthand. Ask any teacher (myself included) who has worked with young people both before and after the advent of smart phones and they will tell you: smart phones are detrimental to children’s ability to focus and concentrate. They are a net negative.

This is where the true rationale for banning phones in schools becomes clear. It is not about improving outcomes, it is about creating a protected environment in which alternative norms can be experienced and practised. Schools are one of the few spaces where society can collectively decide how young people spend their time. By removing phones, schools model a way of being that prioritises sustained attention, face-to-face interaction and engagement with the immediate environment. These are not trivial skills: they are foundational to learning, relationships and mental health, and they may not be being modelled at home.

Critics might argue that such modelling is paternalistic or authoritarian, but this fundamentally misunderstands how behavioural norms are formed. Young people do not develop their habits in isolation, they are shaped by their environments. If every space they experience, including their classroom, is saturated with digital distraction, then the idea of focused, device-free engagement will seem completely alien to them. Conversely, if schools consistently enforce phone-free environments, they can provide a counterweight to the rest of the day. Over time, this can help recalibrate expectations about when and how phones are used. Even if the measurable impact on grades is initially small, the long-term cultural effect may be substantial.

Equally important is the role that schools can play in supporting parents. Many parents currently feel overwhelmed by the challenge of managing their children’s phone use, particularly given the social pressures involved. If one child in a friendship group is allowed unrestricted access, others will quickly follow. School policies can shift this dynamic by creating a shared baseline and encouraging parents to listen to the instincts that are telling them that these devices are a threat to their children. When phones are banned during the school day, it becomes easier for parents to enforce limits at home, knowing that expectations are consistent across the community. In this sense, school bans are not isolated interventions but part of a broader ecosystem of guidance and support. The messaging becomes clear that smart phones are a cause for concern, in the same way that alcohol anc cigarettes are a cause for concern: while schools can’t prevent all children from discovering the highs that can be found via alcohol and nicotine, they can at least model the principle that these substances are problematic and undesirable.

It is also worth noting that the absence of immediate measurable benefits does not mean the absence of meaningful effects. Some studies have found improvements in classroom behaviour or reductions in distraction, even when academic outcomes may remain unchanged. These are valuable in their own right. A calmer, more focused classroom is a better environment for both teaching and learning, even if its impact on examination grades takes time to materialise. Education is not a simple input-output system: it is a complex, cumulative process.

Phone bans are not a silver bullet, they are one tool among many, to be used alongside education about digital literacy, parental guidance and broader societal conversations about technology use. Expecting them to single-handedly reverse trends in mental health or academic performance is not just unrealistic, it sets them up to fail. When the inevitable modest results appear, critics can then dismiss the entire approach, reinforcing a cycle of inaction. You throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Smartphones are deeply embedded in modern life. Schools cannot control what happens outside their gates, but they can shape the environment within them. By doing so, they send a signal about values: that attention matters, that conversation matters, that not every moment needs to be mediated via a screen. Ultimately, the debate about phones in schools is not just about education policy; it is about the kind of childhood and adolescence society wishes to cultivate. In that context, focusing solely on short-term academic metrics is a profound misreading of the issue. Schools cannot solve the problem alone, but they can play a crucial role in modelling a different way of living and learning: one that recognises both the power and the peril of the devices in our pockets.