Article in the Sunday Telegraph, 9 November 2003 by Ian Hislop.

Keyboards that fail our children

It would be depressing for the Prime Minister if one of the promises on which his Government had actually delivered turned out to be pointless. He said that he would introduce more Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into the schoolroom and he has spent £5 billion in the past five years making sure that there are now a lot more computers used in schools. He talks passionately about the school of the future, with its digital curriculum and its interactive learning tools, but I have never been entirely convinced.

When he launched the first initiatives, I wrote about it in this column, expressing a certain amount of scepticism and suggesting that while pupils have to learn about computers they do not have to learn everything from computers.

The strengths of traditional teaching methods, I argued, should not be forgotten in all the excitement about the education superhighway.

I was accused by some readers of being a Luddite and lining up with the teaching unions, who were suspicious that more computers might mean fewer teachers. But more readers joined the debate, offering testimony both as teachers and pupils that the relationship with a real teacher, interaction with other students, and discussion generated in real rather than virtual classrooms was not possible to replicate on screen. They claimed, too, that the unique experience of reading from books and using books as authorities, rather than merely downloading chunks of text from the Internet, was invaluable.

I have continued to believe this and was therefore pleased to see a piece of research published this week by Staffordshire University and the Open University which has looked at spending on ICT In more than 500 secondary schools. "Across all schools, the effect of ICT expenditure on student outcomes is insignificant," says the report.

And guess what? The survey found that increasing the money spent on books "improves" performance. It quantified this by saying that, for every one-third increase in book expenditure, A-level results go up by half a grade. Its conclusion reads: "Our findings are consistent with the argument that schools 'may be allocating too few resources to books and too many to ICT." This is carefully worded by the academics, but what they are tip-toeing around saying is that Tony Blair got carried sway and that the £5 billion has been a bit of a waste of money. Understandably, the Department for Education and Skills is not very happy with these findings: "The notion that we should not equip our children with ICT skills vital for the 21st century is preposterous." But that is not the point. Of course children should learn ICT skills, but all the other things that they need to know (including the ability to understand, select, evaluate and challenge information) cannot he downloaded at the click of a mouse. One headmistress of a secondary school I spoke to this week said that the trouble with ICT was that the "C bit", the communication with others, could get left out.

Interestingly, the Staffordshire University research appeared in the same week that the head of Ofsted said that the nation's five-year-olds were ill-prepared for starting school. They had insufficient verbal and behavioural skills, because they spent too much time interacting only with a television screen.

The idea that you should then educate these children by sticking them in front of another screen seems rather perverse We may have to accept the children reared on word-processing and spellcheck cannot do joined-up writing any more, but this Government has always boasted about its ability to do "joined up thinking". In education, however, it has been slow to learn the obvious lessons.