A New Plymouth primary school that once queued up to put iPads in front of its youngest pupils has packed the tablets away and gone back to pen, paper and hands-on learning.
Omata School, on the coast just south of New Plymouth, was an early adopter of tablets in the classroom. This year it stopped using them for children in years one to four, the five to eight year olds who are still finding their feet with reading, writing and numbers. What began as a one-term trial has now been extended to the end of the year, when the school will look at the results and decide whether to keep going.
The change was driven by principal Karen Brisco, who told RNZ she had been reading research about how screens affect young, developing brains and it started to nag at her. “I kept thinking ‘I wonder if we should give them a rest and see how it goes’, because the research was concerning around the type of learning,” she said.
What the teachers noticed once the tablets went away was telling. Brisco said the difference showed up in how strongly the children engaged with their work. “It seems that the screens, the activities that they do on screens, are not lighting up the learning pathways as strongly as when they are hands-on,” she said.
She was careful to say this is not a school turning its back on technology. “We’re not against technology at all – we were early adopters of iPads and laptops right at the very beginning,” she said. Older pupils at the school still use laptops for research and for writing up their work, though not for games. The shift is aimed squarely at the youngest children, where the school decided the trade-off no longer stacked up.
The transition was not entirely smooth. Teachers reported that some children had become highly attached to screen-based activities and found the first few weeks without them hard going. That angst had largely faded by the end of the first term, and the school felt confident enough to carry the trial through the rest of the year. Brisco summed up the thinking with a plain line that has become something of a motto for the decision. “When you know better, you do better,” she said.
Omata is not making its call in a vacuum. The Paediatric Society of New Zealand has for some time recommended tight limits on screen time for young children. For two to six year olds it suggests screen sessions of no more than 10 to 15 minutes at a stretch. For six to 12 year olds it advises no more than a third of the school day on screens, and no single session longer than about 20 minutes, with more limited use for the youngest and a gradual increase as children get older. Measured against that yardstick, an all-day tablet in the hands of a six year old looks like a lot.
The decision also lands at a moment when New Zealand is already rethinking how much screen time belongs in a school day. From the start of Term 2 in 2024 the Government banned student use of cell phones during the school day under its “Phones Away for the Day” policy, which applies to state and state-integrated schools with exceptions for learning, health or when a teacher directs otherwise. The Education Review Office has since found compliance patchy, with a Ministry of Education update to school leaders earlier this year putting it at around half of students, and lower again for senior teenagers. You can read the Ministry’s guidance on phones at school for the detail.
The phone ban and Omata’s tablet decision are not the same thing. One is a national rule aimed mainly at personal phones and the distraction they bring; the other is a single school making a professional judgement about the devices it hands children as learning tools. But they point in the same direction, and they reflect a wider mood among parents and teachers who have started to ask whether the rush to put a screen in front of every child delivered what was promised.
New Zealand is not alone in second-guessing that rush. Schools and school districts overseas have been quietly walking back one-to-one device programmes, and some have gone back to books and handwriting for younger year levels while keeping laptops for older students and specific subjects. The common thread is not a rejection of computers so much as a rebalancing, a sense that the physical act of forming letters, turning pages and manipulating objects does something for a young brain that swiping a glass screen does not.
For Omata, the proof will be in the results the school gathers over the rest of the year. If the youngest pupils are reading and writing better without the tablets, the case for keeping them in the cupboard gets stronger. If not, the school has left itself room to change course again. Either way, it is the kind of small, evidence-led experiment that other principals around the country will be watching, because plenty of them have been quietly wondering the same thing Brisco did.
What do you think, has the classroom tablet been oversold, or is Omata throwing out a useful tool? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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