CONTRIBUTORS What if screen-time
is not the problem? Dr BECKY PARRY, Creative Learning Manager for Rotherham Children’s Capital of Culture.
We have become used to talking about children and screens as though they are locked in an unhealthy relationship. But what if we are not paying enough attention to what today’s children want and need? During Rotherham’s year as the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture in 2025, we gave thousands of children and young people opportunities to shape the programme and decide what they wanted to explore.
What surprised us was how often they chose outdoor play, nature and
the physical world. Children chose The World Beneath Our Feet as one of the themes they wanted to explore during our festival year, focusing on nature, sustainability and climate change. They chose outdoor games. They chose to investigate their local river. They wanted to play, run, make things and be outside. But they also chose Plug In and Play, celebrating their love of videogames and digital culture. Our experience suggested this: give children meaningful choices and opportunities, and they don’t necessarily choose the screen, they choose what interests them.
One of our projects involved children from seven primary schools in Rotherham filming the outdoor games they already played. Working with filmmaker Rachel Bunce, they learned about camera angles and storytelling while documenting their own play. The technology didn’t replace the experience; it gave them another way to look at it. There is an important distinction between consuming digital content and creating it. Endless scrolling can be passive. Making an animation, designing a game or filming a story requires imagination, collaboration, problem-solving and critical thinking. When children create media, they also start to understand how media is made.
In one animation project, children became so engaged that many continued creating films at home using free software they had discovered at school. They began asking questions: Who made this? How was it edited? Why does it look this way? What is it trying to tell me?
Those are precisely the questions we want young people to ask in a world shaped by algorithms, influencers and artificial intelligence. We should be careful about defining the problem simply as children spending too much time on screens. Perhaps the more useful question is: what are children doing, making, thinking and experiencing – on screens and off them?
We don’t worry about children reading books because they are consuming too many stories. And we don’t tell children to stop listening to music because they aren’t making enough of it; we give them instruments and lessons. The same principle should apply to technology. Through playful learning with digital media, children started on an important journey to develop critical awareness, enabling them to navigate content that seeks to persuade and influence them. Rotherham’s experience gave us a glimpse of what can happen when we give children new tools for thinking about technology. They didn’t abandon the outdoors for screens. They didn’t abandon screens for the outdoors either. They chose both.
Perhaps that’s the future of the screen-time debate: not asking how we get children away from technology, but how adults, teachers and family, can give children more opportunities to develop agency through creativity.
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www.education-today.co.uk
Beyond the register: getting to the root of poor attendance this September EMMA SANDERSON, Managing
Director of Momenta Connect – part of Outcomes First Group – discusses how schools can start off on the right foot when it comes to student attendance.
The first weeks of a new school year are the moment attendance patterns
are set. Get the culture right now, and schools spend the rest of the year reinforcing good habits rather than firefighting entrenched absence.
The Department for Education’s updated statutory guidance, ‘Working together to improve school attendance (July 2026)’, gives school leaders a timely prompt to revisit how they understand and respond to the reasons behind non-attendance. Its central message bears repeating at the start of term: absence is very rarely the problem itself, but a symptom of something else going on in a student’s life, whether that’s anxiety, bullying, a health condition, caring responsibilities at home, or family circumstances that make the school gate feel like an obstacle rather than a welcome. Culture before compliance
The guidance is clear that good attendance is a ‘learned behaviour’. Patterns established early in a student’s school life, and early in each school year, tend to stick. That places real weight on the first half-term. Schools should use this period to re-communicate expectations clearly to pupils and parents, refresh the attendance policy, and make sure every member of staff understands that attendance is everyone’s responsibility. A named Senior Attendance Champion on the leadership team remains central to this, but the guidance is equally clear that punitive, compliance-first responses should never be the starting point. Schools are expected to build relationships with families, listen to the barriers they describe, and work in partnership to remove them before reaching for formal or legal routes. Spotting patterns early
Autumn term data is unusually valuable as it’s the first real chance to compare this year’s cohort against last year’s baseline and catch drift before it becomes habitual. The guidance asks schools to move beyond headline percentages and look at individual pupils, cohorts, and year groups, including punctuality, so support can be targeted before absence becomes persistent (10%+) or severe (50%+).
Particular cohorts deserve early attention: students with a social worker, young carers, those with SEND or long-term health conditions, and students from backgrounds with historically lower attendance. For many of these students, the guidance is explicit that school itself can be part of the solution; prolonged absence often deepens the underlying anxiety or disengagement it was meant to relieve.
Formal and informal support
Where voluntary support isn’t working, the guidance sets out a graduated escalation. Attendance contracts, education supervision orders, and only as a last resort, penalty notices or prosecution. Schools maintained by local authorities must now also avoid blanket policies on leave of absence, judging each request on its individual merits.
For leaders planning September’s attendance strategy, the underlying message is simple. Strong relationships, rigorous data, and early listening will do more for attendance this year than any single enforcement tool.
September 2026
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