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BACK TO SCHOOL SERIES: Issue 3
An analogue revolution is in the air. Everywhere you look it seems people are yearning for a return to simpler, notification-free times. 90s and early noughties fashion fills the runways and high street shops alike. Interest in offline activities like birdwatching, gardening and reading is soaring. Much more than trends and social media likes, the prevailing feeling seems to be that something vital has been lost within the digital revolution – that amid the connectedness and advancement of knowledge and technology, our humanity has been challenged, and we didn’t even realise it.
The education sector has been no different in this sense. Nowhere has this been demonstrated more clearly than in Sweden, a country that has traditionally been ahead of the curve in terms of the adoption of digital technology for education. Sweden spent 15 years building the most digital school system in Europe. By 2015, four in five state high school pupils had their own device. By 2019, tablets were compulsory in pre-schools. Roll on seven years, and the teachers there have started collecting phones from every child aged 7 to 16 at the school gate, and a new book-based curriculum is set to launch in 2028.
Sweden: A Case Study in Cutting Back on Digital Learning
Once Europe’s most committed digital education adopter, Sweden has been one of the first countries to move away from a digital-first approach, and towards more printed textbooks, handwriting, paper-based tests, and restricted screen use. So much so, that the government has put around 2.1 billion krona into printed textbooks – the goal being a physical book, per subject, per child.
But what prompted this about-turn in policy? The shift in approach followed falling literacy levels identified in PISA 2022. PISA is a large-scale international study run by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development) and stands for Programme for International Student Assessment. It assesses how well 15-year-old students can apply their knowledge and skills in reading, maths and science. In 2022, 24.3% of Swedish ninth graders failed to reach a basic level of reading comprehension. Sweden’s own National Agency for Education linked the worst results to high non-learning digital media use, and their then schools minister called the whole digitalisation programme “an experiment that wasn’t scientifically grounded”.
Knowing that students’ ability to read and understand what they read is the foundation of their learning in all school subjects, the Swedish government’s renewal of focus on physical books, pens and paper reflects a need to re-establish basic skills in the early years of school. Sweden’s Ministry of Education and Research is explicit that this is a “recalibration not a reversal”. The thinking is that digitalisation remains fundamentally beneficial in education, but more thought needs to go into how it is deployed, particularly for younger pupils who need to build basic skills.
Europe Questions the Digitalisation of Learning
Following Sweden’s national policy reversal in 2023, many other European countries have been looking at their own educational strategies. Nearby Denmark found more than half of their Grade 6 and 8 pupils were being distracted by screens in lessons. From 2026, Denmark’s going mobile-free in its primary and lower secondary schools, while investing over 540 million DKK over ten years to replace classroom tablets with physical textbooks.
In the Netherlands, phones, tablets and smartwatches have been restricted since 2024. The government’s own evaluation found that around 75% of secondary schools reported improved focus in lessons. Similarly, Finland introduced restrictions on phones and shifted focus back to paper-based learning in 2024.
England itself is set to make the Department for Education’s guidance on “Mobile phones in schools” statutory from September 2026, meaning all schools will need to consider how they implement a mobile phone-free environment. The rest of the UK is not far behind; Scotland introduced national guidance in June 2026 restricting personal phone use at school, Northern Ireland has introduced departmental guidance on personal phone use supported by a nine-school pilot, and the Welsh government is beginning a consultation on statutory guidance beginning in September 2026.
The Digital Rethink
Just as wider culture has begun to reexamine some of the ways we interact with digital media, so the education sector has followed. It’s not so much that screens are invariably bad for education, it’s how they’re used that seems to be important. Digital tools need to be used selectively and thoughtfully, rather than automatically rolled out in the name of improving efficiency or standardisation of assessment. Nowhere is this clearer than when it comes to our youngest pupils, who need a good grounding in reading, writing, and working from physical books first. Ideally without the distraction of their mobile phone nearby!
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