Poor handwriting "caused by modern prams and car seats" warns Scottish academic

Theresa Campbell, a senior lecturer from Glasgow University's School of Education, says modern babies are constantly supported from birth in cushioned prams, buggies and reinforced car seats.

She believes that, as a result, pupils grow up without the basic physical skills required to sit for an extended period.

The warning comes after The Herald revealed concerns from examiners that standards of handwriting among Scottish pupils were getting worse.

A report into this year's Higher English exam revealed ­markers had identified "near-illegible" sentences on the papers submitted by some students.

The warnings come as concerns mount that teenagers brought up using email, texting and web-based social media sites to communicate have lost the ability to work with a pen and paper.

Handwriting has not only been shown to support literacy skills such as reading, writing, and speaking, but research also shows it develops areas of the brain that improve wider learning skills.

The issue is considered so important by some private schools, such as Erskine and Stewart's Melville Junior School, in Edinburgh, that all pupils are expected to use fountain pens to develop handwriting skills.

Mrs Campbell said: "My concern is that in our current society we are engineering out a lot of experiences that young children need in order to prepare them for learning and give them the physical skills to write.

"What is required for writing is the skill of holding a particular posture for a long time, but young people are being denied a lot of the prerequisites that allow them to develop that postural control because prams, buggies and car seats now support the body rather than letting babies use their muscles."

Eileen Prior, executive director of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, said good handwriting was a skill that had long been valued, but was now gradually being lost.

She said: "The neat, copperplate handwriting of our parents or grandparents is largely a thing of the past. Many parents do care about their children's ­writing and it would be helpful if school approaches and policies on ­handwriting were discussed with families and parents given guidance of needed."

Ken Cunningham, general secretary of School Leaders ­Scotland, which represents secondary headteachers, said good handwriting was vital.

He said: "We recognise the way young people communicate with each other these days does not involve using longhand, but it is still an important skill. There will always be circumstances when pupils have to use handwriting and it is crucial it is legible.

"Schools and teachers need to reinforce the importance of this to all pupils, and those sitting Higher English should be ensuring their handwriting can be read."

The concerns come as new research published by the National Literacy Trust revealed a significant difference in the amount of time boys and girls spend writing.

The study found almost a third of boys never or rarely write for fun outside class while almost a third of girls write every day. Six out of ten boys say they don't enjoy writing at all.

The trust said the trend could be having a negative impact on boys' attainment at school with young people who write for fun outside school every day four times more likely to be writing above the expected level for their age compared with those who never write outside school.

Overall, the National Literacy Trust's fourth annual literacy survey of almost 30,000 8 to 16-year-olds shows that boys are much less enthusiastic about writing than girls.

The charity's report Children and Young People's Writing found boys were twice as likely as girls to say that they don't enjoy writing at all, almost a third of girls write daily outside the classroom, compared with only 21 per cent of boys.

Girls write more widely across a variety of formats such as social networking sites, text messages and lyrics. They also tweet more than boys.