Laptops out, pens back: Sydney school leads Australia's classroom tech purge

When term starts next year at Marian Catholic College in Kenthurst, the years 7 to 10 classrooms will look a lot like the 1990s. The laptops and devices students once used in lessons are gone, part of what the school calls a digital purge. A survey of teachers, students and parents this year backed the move, making Marian one of a handful of NSW schools to effectively ban one-to-one technology.

Principal Matthew Smith says the devices hurt focused attention, ate into students' working memory and put a wall between pupils and their teacher. Teachers also struggled to police screens, with teenagers quick to flick between apps to hide what they were really doing. The decision wasn't unanimous, he admits: a handful of teachers would have preferred simply cutting back device use. Some laptops stay for selective use because the NSW curriculum still requires occasional computer work.

The pivot is bigger than one school. NSW Education Minister Prue Car has introduced screen time caps of as little as 15 minutes a day for some students, pointing to the cognitive benefits of writing by hand rather than typing. Primary curriculums were being rewritten last week to pull emphasis away from digital skills, and NAPLAN writing tests return to pen and paper for year 5. On Sunday the NSW government said parents won't be required to buy expensive laptops or tablets.

The backlash has been building for years. Heads Up Alliance founder Dany Elachi, a NSW father, called the screen time caps and NAPLAN reforms a step in the right direction. His group wants primary school device-free, handwriting and foundational literacy restored, physical books as the default and no generative AI in schools at all. It has started a petition it hopes to hand to federal Education Minister Jason Clare, and says the mood among parents and teachers has gone from a whisper to a shout. Similar fights are playing out overseas, with US group Schools Beyond Screens lobbying against devices and New York parents rallying outside classrooms against AI.

Researchers keep stacking up evidence for the analogue camp. Studies show handwriting produces more elaborate brain connectivity patterns than typing, because it demands fine motor coordination, visual processing and cognitive engagement. Charles Sturt University adjunct associate professor Noella Mackenzie welcomes the shift but warns it needs to start with time to actually practise. She says handwriting drops off around year 3, leaving students who mix typing and writing proficient in neither. "Education is not entertainment," she said. "And not everything we learn to do is instantly going to be easy and fun."

Announcing the change is the easy part. Lisa Crampton, head of primary learning at the Catholic Diocese of Parramatta, says her schools are buying more physical books and mini-whiteboards and treating handwriting as part of building knowledge, not just recording it. La Trobe University lecturer Sarah Warby notes the edtech industry has been plugging gaps in hard-to-staff subjects, and that millennial parents raised on project-based learning may need to rethink what school is for.