NSW Public Schools to Introduce Strict Daily Screen Time Limits

Students in NSW public schools will be limited to as little as 15 minutes of screen time per day, under guidelines announced by the state government.

The 15-minute limit will apply to students from kindergarten to year 2.

Students in years 3 and 4 will have up to 30 minutes of daily classroom screen time, increasing to 45 minutes for years 5 and 6.

The guidelines will be introduced next year, but will not become mandatory until 2028.

Education Minister Prue Car said children needed to get back to basics, including using pens and paper.

"We want to make sure that at school it's not the default, that the default is pen and paper."

Screen time limits will be more relaxed for high-schoolers, with digital learning allowed to make up 25 per cent of a subject's coursework for years 7 to 10.

Students in years 11 and 12 will be able to spend half their class time on digital devices like laptops and tablets.

Raising standards

The state government said the screen time limits were designed to arrest a "worrying trend" of falling academic results.

Ms Car said according to the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Australian students were nearly twice as likely to spend more than two hours a day learning using digital devices than the OECD average.

Last week, PISA data also showed reading and mathematics scores for 15 year olds in NSW were going backwards.

"There's no doubt the two are linked, and they're linked around the world," Ms Car said.

Education secretary Murat Dizdar said while technology would continue to play an important role in classrooms, imposing screen time limits would help students concentrate.

"It's about backing in the research and evidence that our own students and our teachers are telling us around avoiding distractions in the learning process."

Digital detox a 'relief' for students

While mobile phones have been banned in all NSW classrooms for several years, some schools have recently been trialling their own limits on other forms of screen time.

Chatswood High School principal, Robin Chand, said since paring back the use of digital devices, staff had noticed an improvement in students' handwriting and engagement.

"I know that this will be welcomed by students because students directly tell me that they feel relieved at times when they are working directly with pen and paper and their course books," Mr Chand said.

"When screens go down, relationships go up.

"And the relationships that are the most important in our classroom are relationships between the students and their teachers," he said.

Seventeen-year-old student, Archie Newman, said learning with hard copy books, pens and paper had allowed him to slow down and think more deeply, without the temptations of a laptop or tablet.

"I was someone who could get distracted so easily with digital technology," he said.

"And [now] the emphasis on handwriting is allowing me and my learning experience to be maximised."