Digital Skills, Analogue Childhood
OUR TECHNOLOGY POLICY
Digital Skills, Analogue Childhood
We recognise the powerful role that technology plays both for good and for potential harm in our children’s lives.
Our headline approach is phone-free to Sixth Form. Whatever choices families make in their personal lives, we want school to be a window of freedom for our young people. Sixth Formers in Years 12 and 13 and staff may use phones in their Common Rooms and study spaces but they are also phone-free around the campus. Five minutes seeing students playing board games and messing about on our lawns during break is ample evidence of the benefits of this approach.
We do want children to learn to navigate the digital world and to become critical thinkers about the benefits and harms of AI, so we issue them with iPads (and a choice of iPads or Macbooks in Middle and Upper Sixth). These devices are under close control, with no compulsory home use for younger students and parental controls over internet access, again to help them manage and gain control of their use of screens.
I have the sense that the school protects childhood whilst encouraging the children to take responsibility for their own learning and behaviour.
– Thomas’s College Parent
