Thought Leadership
Screen Use, Not Screen Time: Choosing Technology with Purpose in Education
Concern about children’s screen time has become one of the defining anxieties in education today. Parents worry about distraction, shrinking attention spans, and screens crowding out books, conversation and play. These are legitimate concerns. In response, education systems across Australia are reaching for a blunt instrument: fixed time limits and blanket device restrictions. This is the wrong focus.
The question guiding policy shouldn’t be how much time children spend on screens, but how, why and for what purpose. A child clicking through a repetitive worksheet is having a completely different experience to a child programming a robot or building a digital idea with classmates, even if both register the same minutes on a tracker. Educationally, they’re worlds apart.
At Williamstown, where I lead the education of students from Prep to Year 4, this distinction shapes every decision our staff make about technology, and it’s the argument I want to put to the sector as governments move to regulate device use in schools.
Victoria has announced screen time restrictions for primary schools from 2027, and the federal government has called for a “digital detox.” The reasons are understandable, but it’s worth being honest about how thin the evidence base is. In June 2026, AERO confirmed to a Senate committee that it had not researched student outcomes from educational device use, the shift away from devices in schools, or the evidence base for age-specific time limits. At the time Victoria was introducing school device restrictions, Australia’s national education evidence body had not examined these specific questions.
The evidence that does exist points elsewhere. Start with the fear behind most calls for a “digital detox”: that screens themselves damage children’s wellbeing. In 2019, Oxford researchers tested this using data from more than 300,000 teenagers. Technology use explained, at most, 0.4% of the differences in their wellbeing, an effect the lead researcher compared to eating potatoes regularly. Counting hours was never a good way to measure harm.
An Australian early-childhood researcher made the same point in a 2026 article for The Conversation: “screen time” is an outdated concept because it measures quantity, not quality. What matters is what children are doing, and whether an adult is engaged with them. She also notes most parents already find time-based rules hard to stick to, a sign the rules were never solving the real problem. Studies comparing active screen time, like schoolwork or creating, to passive screen time, like watching videos, consistently find the same split: active use brings the benefits, passive use brings the problems people associate with “too much screen time.”
The clearest sign of where this is heading came in early 2026, when the American Academy of Paediatrics, the world’s most cited authority here, updated its decade-old guidance. The blunt rule, no screens under two, one hour a day for ages two to five, is largely gone, replaced by a simple set of questions: what’s the content, does it help the child stay calm, what is it displacing, and does it help them connect with others. When the world’s most-followed screen-time rule moves away from counting hours, education policy should follow.
None of this means every screen activity belongs in the classroom. I don’t support devices for passive tasks that offer little more than repetition, a digital worksheet is still just a worksheet, nor screen time as a reward for finishing work, which teaches children that learning is something to get through. Children need rich experiences with real objects and real people, and technology shouldn’t push these aside just because it’s quicker. But saying no to poor uses of technology isn’t the same as saying no to technology altogether.
When children learn robotics and coding, for instance, they’re sequencing instructions, testing ideas and learning from getting it wrong. A robot that goes off course gives a child a real problem to solve. Tools like Scratch work the same way: children become creators rather than viewers. A 2025 review of 49 studies across Australia, the UK and Finland found that coding and robotics programs consistently helped engagement and problem-solving, but only when teachers were trained and confident enough to guide the activity, not just supervise it. A robot in the room doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. Good teaching does.
Picture two students who each spend 30 minutes on a device. One clicks through simple questions until the program says they’re done. The other works with a partner to program a character, tests it, and improves it. A screen-time count treats those as identical. As an educator, I can’t. Time still matters, and long unbroken stretches on a device should worry us. But Australia’s own health guidelines already draw this line: the recommendation of no more than two hours of sedentary recreational screen time excludes schoolwork. The first ever screen time guideline, issued in 1999, was only about television for children under two. There’s never been an equivalent number for a ten-year-old coding a science project.
There’s a deeper reason purposeful screen use matters, beyond any single lesson. Knowing how to open an app doesn’t mean a child can judge whether information is trustworthy. The 2025 National Assessment Program for ICT Literacy found only half of Year 6 students, and just 37% of Year 10 students, met the expected standard, both down since 2022, despite most students having used devices for five years or more. Familiarity doesn’t teach digital literacy, it has to be taught, and schools are one of the only places every child gets this from a trained adult. Cutting back well-designed technology use to lower screen-time numbers risks pushing children towards commercial apps instead, with far less safety, and it hits hardest the students with the fewest alternative ways to build these skills outside school.
This gap in basic digital literacy is what makes the current moment so urgent, because AI is now moving through schools faster than our ability to teach children how to use it well. Around a quarter of Year 10 students already use it regularly for schoolwork. We owe students a genuine duty of care: to help them understand how these tools work and use them thoughtfully, not blindly. This is exactly the gap programs like Day of AI Australia fill, free, national and curriculum-mapped, with students investigating how AI works rather than passively using it. A blanket pullback on screens would sweep up programs like this alongside the passive worksheets we’re right to be wary of. That’s the pendulum swinging too far.
Which brings us back to where the debate should really sit: not on the clock, but on judgement. A fixed screen-time rule can’t weigh curriculum, student needs and learning goals the way a teacher can. What teachers need is clear guidance on good screen use and vetted tools, not a stopwatch implying they can’t be trusted to judge when a digital tool belongs in a lesson, particularly while the profession is already under real workload pressure.
Preparing students for a world shaped by digital technology and AI doesn’t mean putting a device in front of them constantly. It means teaching them to make good choices. A well-rounded education includes books, pencils, outdoor play, robotics and thoughtfully chosen digital tools. The task is picking the right approach for the learning. Good education comes down to knowing the difference.
Selected references
- Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO). Response to Senate Question on Notice from Senator Slade Brockman, 9 June 2026.
- Orben A, Przybylski AK. Nature Human Behaviour. 2019;3:173–182.
- Highfield K. The Conversation, 2026.
- American Academy of Paediatrics. Updated guidance on children, adolescents, and digital media. Paediatrics. 2026.
- Mills KA, Cope J, Scholes L, Rowe L. Review of Educational Research. 2025.
- ACARA. National Assessment Program – ICT Literacy 2025, Public Report.
- World Health Organization. Guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under 5. Geneva: WHO; 2019.
- Day of AI Australia. dayofaiaustralia.com
