Let's Listen

“Things change, and often they change because people, individuals, groups, movements and countries make them change. Your part may be big or small, but whether you are a technologist, a lawyer, a politician, a civil servant, an investor, a teacher, a concerned parent or a consumer of technology, you could make a difference for all our futures”

“It’s changed childhood completely from what used to be play-based childhood, to a phone-based childhood. The number of times I see a child or toddler have a tantrum if they have a screen taken away from them – that represents addiction, and unless we start to reverse the trend, we are sleepwalking into a significant mental health problem”

“We have to accompany powerful systems with balancing demands that put our rights, our human needs and our childrens needs in the centre of those systems before deployment. We need for lawmakers to imagine the world that we want to live in and work out how technology is going to help us live in this world, not just mitigate harms. We need to recalibrate how we treat children in the digital environment”

“We want our children back” 

“Even the most basic child protections are missing in the edtech environment today ... the friction is going to grow and grow and there is no good way of dealing with it right now. Because the education sector is being opened up to a wider range of commercial, outside parties, it is also being opened up to the risks and challenges that brings. It can no longer be something put in the box marked ‘too difficult’"

“When policy makers focus on issues of the day there is excessive time spent on arguing for a pecking order that trades off children’s protection, participation and privacy online. In doing so, they can forget the purposes of pedagogy and learning in the digital environment. There is a DfE strategy on EdTech but it’s all about the technology, companies and exports. While those things are important, there is no parallel vision for a long-term consistent approach for children in the digital environment in education”

“We are not asking the right questions in education. We are asking how do we use this technology to help deliver the educational outcomes that were designed 200 years ago in response to the needs of the first industrial revolution? Or we ask, how do we stop children using this technology to circumnavigate this system - to write better essays or create better coursework? But of course, those are not the questions. The question is, if this technology can now write better essays than the vast majority of adults why are we spending 14 years of our children’s lives and millions if not billions of pounds teaching them to write better essays? The question is why, when we have more pastoral care than ever, are the rates of depression and anxiety exponentially increasing?  The question is, what skills are going to be needed in the world that is coming and how are we going to pivot our educational system to put those skill and that knowledge at the heart of what we do?” 

“None of the most powerful tech companies answer to what’s best for people, only to what’s best for them”

“The rush to digitise has had an impact on society and the environment, as well as on treasured norms”

“We cannot have a society in which if two people wish to communicate the only way that can happen is if its financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them” 

“The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, “No more!” We too can be the authors of many “great and beautiful” new facts that reclaim the digital future as humanity’s home.”  

“The introduction of EdTech in schools has not always provided a safe and secure environment…there is widespread invasion of children’s privacy, little evidence to support the claimed learning benefits, and perhaps most important in the long run, no grand plan for using children’s data in their best interests”

“When children first started getting smartphones a decade ago, there was no research about their impact. Now there is, and it's overwhelming. Exposing children to things their brains aren’t yet developed enough to deal with can cause a whole host of problems, from triggering anxiety and eating disorders, to opening the door to cyberbullying or sexual predators… When we give our children access to the whole world in their pocket, we give the whole world access to our children”