TV host Sarah Beeny has slammed her son’s £33,000-a-year private school, for making iPads a requirement for learning and their over-reliance on technology.
The 52-year-old has described the dependence on technology as ‘really, really toxic’, expressing the idea that the incorporation of iPads at school has made it ‘impossible’ for the presenter to limit screen time at home.
Sarah has four sons Billy, 20, Charlie, 18, Rafferty, 14, and Laurie, 12, with artist husband Graham Swift. And all either attend or have previously attended before graduating, Millfield School in Somerset.
The property expert said: ‘That’s basically like asking someone to diet and then shoving the entire fridge full of cream doughnuts and saying, ‘Could you just meander and find the carrot at the bottom?’ and then expecting to use self-control.
‘And when they don’t use self-control you say, ‘Well, what is wrong with you?’ I don’t think you can pass it back to the parents.
TV host Sarah Beeny has slammed her son’s £33,000 a year private school, for making iPads a requirement for learning and their over-reliance on technology.
The 52-year-old has described the dependence on technology as ‘really, really toxic’, expressing the idea that the incorporation of iPads at school has made it ‘impossible’ for the presenter to limit screen time at home
‘People have said to me before ‘Why don’t you use parental controls?’ and I’m like, ‘well I’m at work, I’m really busy, and they can get around it anyway.”
Sarah’s distaste for the use of technology in schools continues further when she goes as far to say devices stopped children’s ‘brains developing’ and limited their social skills.
The Property Ladder presenter has called on schools, pressing them to impose tighter restrictions on devices in schools and said no child should be able to ‘look up a game’ on school-owned technology.
She added: ‘Pupils shouldn’t be able to do anything because it’s like a school textbook. You don’t have a school textbook and then stick Beano in the back of it, do you?’
The mother-of-four’s frustration comes from the concept of children in schools having access to things they shouldn’t on school-owned devices, arguing that it makes children less productive as they get distracted easier, provided they’re given a tablet to do their maths homework but then gets distracted and goes and uses social media like Snapchat and forgets all about the homework they were tasked with.
She went on to propose the idea that schools should not issue devices until they are responsible for the content on them, and children cannot download social media.
Ms Beeny has four sons with artist husband Graham Swift. And all either attend or have previously attended before graduating, Millfield School in Somerset
Schools can impose restrictions on devices such as smooth wall software that blocks certain types of content from being accessed, but children try to get around them and more and more children are becoming successful in bypassing these software systems.
Beeny relates to all parents, not just herself by expressing that the incorporation of technology in student learning affects all families as it makes it much harder to monitor the amount of time their children spend on technology daily.
The presenters children attend Millfield school, that has been attended previously by David Beckham’s son Romeo Beckham, 21, McLaren F1 driver Lando Norris, 24, and Paralympic Medallist John McFall, 43.
Millfield has been approached for comment.
The presenters children attend Millfield school (seen)
