Will Glasgow City Council's schools iPad scheme raise attainment?

Who's this old Luddite, prattling on? Well, er, Bill Gates there, a man who might know a thing or two about a technology or two. Mr Gates, founder of the little tech firm Microsoft Corporation, was speaking in 2012 about the notion of giving students tablet devices.

Proceed with caution, seemed to be his overall theme.

It's perhaps unfortunate timing that as the trend for taking a digital detox is becoming yet more de rigueur, Glasgow City Council is rolling out a £300 million plan – funds spent over seven years – that includes providing every pupil from primary six to S6 in the city with their own iPad.

For nursery and early primary aged pupils, it will be one iPad shared between five children.

I wrote about the roll out of Glasgow's iPad scheme in December last year, in The Herald's sister title, the Evening Times. It caused absolutely no waves whatsoever. The only feedback I received was from teachers who felt discomfort at the education authority making such a substantial deal with a company – Apple – which has a morally dubious (though entirely legal) record on its taxes.

It was at the centre of an IT catastrophe where 20,000 farmers were affected by a glitch that meant they did not receive their farm subsidy payments.

In December the roll out of the first phase of around 5000 iPads was for teachers. This week Glasgow City Council did a major launch of the first phase of handing out around 50,000 of the devices to city pupils and the feedback has been rife - and interesting.

There have been many snarky comments along the lines of this being a great day for the city's pawn shops and/or the Barras. Cue too quips about the weans being mugged on the way home from school. Aspiring city, amirite?

What is interesting is that, while the council is promoting the move as groundbreaking, innovative and a strategy that will tackle inequality in the city while increasing employability of its young citizens. Free iPads! Who could have imagined pushback to that line?

Yet parents I've spoken to simply don't want their children to have the responsibility of a school iPad and feel it's an unhelpful interference in the daily battle to cut down on screentime. For parents who have actively chosen not to allow their children tablets or devices, it's an intrusion too far.

There is a great parental divide on screen time and the owning of gadgets. One of the biggest issues seems not to be the screens themselves but how they are used with the most important takeaway being that they should not be used to excess. So, last year paediatric doctors from the Heart of England foundation NHS Trust warned that children are finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology.

Pupils starting school lack "the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago" and do not have "fundamental movement skills," according to the head paediatric occupational therapist at the Trust.

Then you have the fears about screen time slowing development, its relentless ability to entertain prevents children having the benefits of being a bit bored, it isolates children or encourages them to bully one another. And etc.

Yet studies often mention lack of sleep when considering the use of computers and tablets, pupils staying up until the wee hours on their devices.

Lack of sleep cannot be underestimated in how it affects mood and cognitive ability. So it will be up to parents to police the council iPads. While the majority of parents will already be doing this with phones and computers their children already possess, will it be made harder to do so when the ultimate retort is "My teacher says it's fine."

In San Francisco's Silicon Valley – where you find all the tech experts who are designing these devices – private schools list having phone and tablet bans as a boon. Of course, the very point of private schools is privilege, but it is a real marker of that privilege to be able to reject tech.

To be able to do so implies knowing that pupils will be using technology at home and will be developing the computer skills they need elsewhere. That isn't a luxury allowed to the state school system, particularly not in Glasgow where some parts of the city have up to 40 per cent of children living in poverty.

In fact, this was something that had to be taken into account before dishing out the iPads: would all pupils have wifi at home and could they afford to charge them? Those without wifi are being signposted to libraries and homework clubs while schools will have charging banks.

While the council hopes the iPads will help narrow the attainment gap, at the other end of the scale, the Scottish Book Trust has released figures showing fewer than a third of parents read to their children every day, dropping to 15 per cent for those who were not read to as a child.

The charity wants to help raise attainment and "fight the effects of living in poverty" by encouraging reading to children, citing that it helps improve employability, boosts social skills and family bonding, reduces stress and anxiety, and develops language skills.

There are those arguing the council should be investing in such basics before going for the expensive electronics. There's also the question of the evidence that tablet computers – at a cost of £300 million of public money – will really make much difference.

This is the largest iPad roll out in Europe and one of the largest in the world. Glasgow City Council says it is innovating... others may say there is a reason the move is so unusual. In fact, there have been cases where iPad roll outs have been a failure.

In 2013 Los Angeles schools spent $1.3 billion giving iPads to every pupil in every school. Two years later the scheme was revealed as a vastly expensive failure.

Finland is oft-cited as an exemplary education model, the best in the world, and is regularly listed at the top of the international Pisa education rankings. In 2016 the education ministry decided to introduce more tech into schools and announced 50 million euros to assist teachers in using electronic devices in the classroom.

Across Pisa measurements it was found that the more digital tools were used, the worse learning outcomes were. Researchers were unsurprised: "There have been similar findings from research in other countries. And many parents have said the same thing."

It would, though, be foolish to think the education department in Glasgow hasn't looked at examples of the scheme elsewhere and ways it might mitigate problems here. There is, I'm told, intense pedagogical training underway to ensure teachers have the skills they need to make the iPads an advantage in the classroom.

If one thing's for certain, it is that such schemes will be raising generations of dutiful consumers. If you've been raised to believe something is absolutely necessary for your education then what do you do when your state-funded Apple product is taken away? You buy your own.

Back to Bill Gates. He didn't, and he would be unlikely to, dismiss tech in the classroom altogether. He said tablets were an inappropriate tool and that the best choice is a "low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive."

This is far from a low-cost scheme and it remains to be seen whether parents and doubtful teachers will be won round. We are, though, in a digital age and working out how best to protect children from the downsides of screens while preparing them for a digital worklife is a vital question.

It will be interesting to see what answers Glasgow's iPads provide.