Our lost generation of children Part three: Low engagement with learning

• Mental Health Awareness Week begins on 12th May 2025. The timing couldn’t be more apt as this is the season of scrutiny, assessment and accountability. Young people are expected to revise for exams and this time of year is a pressure point for teens in particular. Many teachers are putting in extra hours and holding space for their pupils right now, supporting them emotionally as well as academically.

Teachers take on extra marking and host drop-in ‘clinics’ at lunchtimes and revision clubs after school and even at weekends. They create workbooks and endless online resources designed to help pupils improve their grades. In primary schools, there is an emphasis on pupil and teacher well-being. Rather than adding to the pressure, many schools take the view that a relaxed child can perform better.

There’s also pressure at home. I’ve spoken to many parents of children who are really struggling at the moment. These are parents who have aspirations for their child, but there is a problem. The child is not studying and becomes angry and violent when they are denied access to their phone at home.

Of course, this behaviour is a barrier to learning. And yet, research on mobile phone bans in schools has been described as equivocal - but I’m going to break this down, based on neuroscience and what has been discovered about the brain’s reward pathways in addictive behaviour. We have all heard about the algorithms and the instant gratification that they offer, and I’m going to drill into this.

In 2023 an academic journal called JAMA Pediatrics published a paper called Attention Span Decline in Younger Children. The researchers found that children aged 6 to 12 are losing the ability to concentrate for longer periods compared to previous generations. The study found that the average attention span of children had decreased by up to 25% over the last two decades. The authors attributed this decline to digital distractions, reduced outdoor play, and increased exposure to fast-paced media, such as short-form videos and games.

In February 2024, a blog post published by the British Educational Research Association discussed the impact of banning mobile phones on educational outcomes, based on an analysis of PISA scores published earlier by the OECD. These data suggested that bans on mobile phones reduced student distractibility in some education systems around the world such as those in Singapore and Finland, but not in others such as Albania and Greece. The authors of the BERA blog post ran an analysis that controlled for the likely influences on these score. They were interested in possible effects of gender, socioeconomic status and school behaviour on the effectiveness of banning mobile phones.

They found that there was a negative effect on student outcomes in the schools which applied a stronger ban. This finding is somewhat counter intuitive because mobile phones are a source of distraction for most people. How might we interpret this seemingly unexpected finding?

Withdrawal and addiction

I think the reason behind it is actually very concerning. There is a logical possibility that the negative of banning mobile phones on academic outcomes is due to withdrawal symptoms among secondary school children.

Addicts experiencing withdrawal ‘crave’ supply for their addiction and it becomes an obsession until they consummate the craving. A cycle of withdrawal, craving and consummation would arise when a school bans mobile phones. Such a pattern would be repeated on a daily basis and the well-being of the children would probably deteriorate. 

Rather than leaving the data hanging in the air, I would recommend that psychiatrists advise schools on how to manage this difficult problem. We need clear an unequivocal messaging on how to prevent addiction from arising in the first instance.

Last month the Children’s Commissioner’s Office for England conducted a survey which asked children how many hours, if any, they spent in an internet-enabled device with a screen, on a normal day. The majority of children, more than 68 % said they spent more than two hours on a normal day on these devices and for 23 % of the children, the time spent on these devices was more than four hours.

Let’s pause for a moment. If we think about the amount of time it takes to develop a skill such as playing the piano or building strength and stamina through exercising, we would certainly expect a cumulative effect if we put in 30 minutes of consistent practice every day or even on alternating days. Two hours of training or practice every single day over a period of years would be enough for rapid transformation to take place, and four hours of practice every day would really be very visible in a short period of time.

Low engagement with learning

The publishing company Pearson conducted a national survey using a Teacher Tapp poll drawing responses from 10,000 teachers and 2,000 children in primary and secondary schools in April 2024 and published its findings in June last year. The 'School report' showed that 97% of teachers in one week witnessed students having difficulty engaging with their learning. This observation equates to 1.5 million school children. They went on to say that in 55% of schools 7 children in every classroom had difficulty engaging in lessons.

Pearson also surveyed the children about their learning. Their data showed that 6.5 million children in England and 7.7 million across the UK struggle to engage in their lessons. Almost one in five students said they struggled a lot in lessons. The disparity in the data between 1.5 million and 7.7 million suggests that teachers may not be aware of the extent of the chronic difficulties that so many children are experiencing.

This is not surprising given that children want to fit in and to please their teacher - and they will put a brave face on the problem. It is heartbreaking that almost half 45 % of the school children in the survey said they did not understand the work and almost a third 30% thought they were not clever enough.

In recent years, primary school teachers have seen rising levels of SEN in their school and insufficient support. From the teachers’ point of view, the top three barriers to learning in the next 6 months following the data collection (in April 2024) would be SEND, mental health and school attendance, followed by prior learning experience and poverty. These are the external factors that teachers accommodate into their day-to-day ways of working and of course all of this places additional demands on them. If a child is dysregulated, disruptive, triggered, aggressive or hungry they cannot learn without appropriate support and provision and the whole class is affected. But on a more positive note headteachers have told me that when provision is in place and the school does feel inclusive, then there is a 'halo' effect.

When children see that even the most vulnerable in the school community have received care, compassion and the right kind of attention, it gives them a boost in their confidence in learning and in the school.

Schools respond by stepping up.

Half of schools are providing training in mental health and well-being and Special educational needs and disabilities. More than half of all children say that support from teachers has helped them, particularly in primary schools. Only 34 % of children wanted more learning on digital devices in the classroom, whilst only 31 % of children wanted some remote learning from home.

When Pearson asked teachers, ‘what would help students engage more in their learning?’ 85% of teachers said they needed additional staff to support pupils. When asked to predict in three years time technology would have improved an aspect of learning, the majority of teachers thought technology would prepare children for a digital world but only 1 in 10 thought technology would improve pupil outcomes.

Circling Back

It is time for mental health awareness to include explicit instruction on addiction of all kinds, the impact on the structure of the limbic system, and the effect of this on attention, planning, decision making and learning.

In the first instance this form of explicit training would protect and prevent additive patterns from developing in our young generation to such a prevalent extent. And secondly, this form of training would empower us all to take responsibility for our lifestyle choices and to be ore circumspect about our own patterns that may become addictive. Empowering the consumers of technology would force actors in the online space to take more responsibility and to resist the opportunity to entrap their audience using what amount to crude and primitive rhythm-based strategies. Lastly, rhythm-based strategies are effective when the limbic system is in a healthy state. Children need exposure to activities that encourage them to appreciate healthy rewards that are not engineered by high intensity, rapid fire and clustered stimulation. Let’s lean into the arts, creativity and expression going forward.

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