Once an early adopter of iPads, this primary school is now removing screens from young learners

Friday, 10 July 2026

Once an early adopter of iPads, a Taranaki school has stashed its devices on a high shelf in a bid to get its youngest learners learning and connecting - a move its principal says is working.

Ōmata principal Karen Brisco said the school embraced tablets when they hit the mainstream about 15 years ago.

“The children were really excited about using them, the teachers were excited and we’ve had them ever since in the junior classrooms.”

But as time passed, Brisco wondered about the impact the screens had on growing brains.

The devices weren’t in constant use, but part of a rotation of classroom activities, loaded with maths and literacy apps, Brisco said.

But even educational apps are designed to engage children, keeping them locked on the screen, and rewarding them with more screen time.

“We noticed that it became more and more difficult to get some children off the screens when it was their rotation time,” she said.

“They were coming in in the mornings and looking up to see the schedule for the day [to see], when am I on an iPad?”

Over the summer, Brisco looked into the growing research around screens and young learners. Understanding is still evolving, but studies pointed to brains developing differently in front of a screen, than they do when people interact with others.

“You look around, you're noticing families sitting around a dinner table and screens are put in front of children in pushchairs and high chairs.

“You’re thinking, ‘what's this doing to the growing brain and the development of the child and the dependence on the screen?’ ”

At the beginning of the year, Brisco asked her teaching staff what they thought about trialling an iPad-free term for year one to four students.

“And so [iPads] were put in back rooms and offices, and they never came out.”

She wondered if the children would miss the devices, but they didn’t mention them. And when she checked in with her staff, she found teachers weren’t missing them either.

Teachers said children were doing more hands-on activities and communicating with each other. There was also a lack of angst associated with iPad time.

“Teachers were saying how calmer the children were just moving from activity to activity when iPad wasn't one of the activities.”

So, the school has kept going.

Brisco knows technology is an integral part of our lives: from year 5, her students use laptops for research and completing some work.

But she believed the more technology we adopt, the more critical it becomes to foster the learning and creativity that can only come from connecting with each other.

While moves have been made across the Tasman to crack down on screens in schools, no such plan is on the cards for Aotearoa.

Ministry of Education guidance says it is up to schools to develop policies and practices around screen time and digital device use.

The Paediatric Society of New Zealand said there was increasing evidence that managing screen time for students, especially young ones, was important for limiting health and safety risks.

The society recommends children under 6 should have minimal screen time in bursts of 10 to 15 minutes. Students under 12 should spend no more than a third of the school day on devices, in sessions under 20 minutes. And students over 12 should have eye breaks every 20 minutes.

Mark Potter, principal at Wellington’s Berhampore School, has also seen behaviour among his students that he attributes to screens.

For example, Potter has seen children search “obsessively” for screens, refuse to work without a device, or become aggressive and upset when it’s time to switch off.

“Not every child who gets put in front of the screen is going to have this response, but we've got enough who are.”

There were outside forces at work, too, he said.

“It’s not just screens in children’s lives, it’s the screens in the adult lives around them.”

Scott Duncan, a professor of population health at Auckland University, has studied the impact of screen time on children and supported Ōmata school’s stance.

While screens aren’t “bad”, their use for young children should be intentional, teacher-directed and limited to short bursts no longer than 20 minutes, he said.

“Anything beyond that and you’re not engaging children in the same way as you would with a parent-to-child interaction, or drawing or writing things on paper or being physical.

“If a child is sitting for an hour on a screen, they're not learning how to write, they're not interacting with others or with their teacher, they're not being physical and learning that way.”

With many apps designed to keep us engaged, screen use could become addictive, even in very small children, he said.

“It's geared around giving you little hits of dopamine, little rewards to keep you scrolling. We can’t blame kids for getting addicted ‒ or ourselves.

“We're exposing ourselves to multibillion-dollar corporations that are designing things to addict us.”

Doing away with devices wasn’t realistic, Duncan said.

“But I think if you had a choice between excessive use of screens and no screens for children, I would definitely take the no screens option.”

The way brains developed was compromised when traditional learning was replaced with screens, he said.

“Let’s just say you’re typing the letter A. It takes a fraction of your brain to find the key. But if you’re writing A, you’ve got to think about how it's shaped, how to make the pen strokes, how to hold the pen, where to put it in the line: it accesses a much bigger part of your brain than typing.”

When Duncan sees classrooms dominated by screens, he worries about this element of brain development.

“That stuff really needs to not be lost, otherwise we're not giving our children the best developmental opportunities.”