I Marked the Minister's Homework

Thirteen years of school means a lot of my work has been marked, so when the federal government released a 40-page paper called A Digital Detox this week, I thought it was only fair that I mark theirs. The paper argues that screens are the reason students are falling behind, and by the measures it uses they probably are, which would be a damning finding if anyone involved had bothered to ask whether those measures mean anything at all. For a document so concerned about the damage done by screens, it was, of course, published as a PDF.

On 2 November, Australia's Education Ministers agreed to set or consider screen-time limits in schools, restrict generative AI in primary schools and secondary assessments, return the Year 5 NAPLAN writing test to pen and paper, and establish an Australian Schools Digital Detox Taskforce. The Minister explained the thinking on ABC News, saying screens in classrooms have "gone too far" and that "mums and dads know it too. They see what screens do to their kids at home." That is the entire argument, and it tells you exactly who this paper was written for. It is a policy built to appeal to a mass of parents who have convinced themselves that the reason their children show so little capacity for achievement is too much interaction with a screen, and it is far more politically convenient to agree with them than to admit that the education system those children are stuck in might be the thing failing them.

Measuring the wrong thing

Every measure of falling behind in the paper is a test score. Students who spend more time on devices for leisure at school score lower in PISA science, university students who take handwritten notes do better in their exams, and students who use AI score higher on homework and lower on monthly exams. In every case the paper treats the score as the definition of learning and never once asks what the test is actually measuring.

For the most part, these tests measure how much a student can recall and reproduce on their own, against the clock, without any of the tools they use every other hour of the day. The entire education system has been built around that one skill, and it bears almost no resemblance to the way anyone works once they leave school, where nearly everything is done on a computer with access to information, other people and, increasingly, AI. Students falling behind on a measure like that tells you a great deal about the measure.

Changing the test to suit the system

The NAPLAN decision is the clearest example of how backwards this is. Ministers agreed to move the Year 5 writing test back to pen and paper, and the Minister's own release says this will mean NAPLAN "better tests primary school kids' proficiency in writing without the distraction of a screen". Almost all the writing these students will do outside a classroom will be typed, so the government has taken a test of writing, turned it into a test of handwriting, and presented that as a win for education.

The AI study the paper cites gets the same treatment. More than 26,000 Chinese secondary students who used AI improved their homework scores by 18 per cent while their monthly exam scores fell by 20 per cent, and the paper concludes that AI harms learning. The far more obvious conclusion is that the homework and the exam were measuring two different things, one with the tools students actually have and one without them, and the paper, without a moment's thought, assumes the exam is the one that matters.

Numbers pulled from nowhere

If the tests are arbitrary, the limits are worse. Victoria will allow 90 minutes a day for Years 3 to 6, New South Wales will allow 30 minutes a day for Years 3 and 4 and 45 minutes for Years 5 and 6, and Madrid has settled on two hours a week. Nobody in the paper explains where any of these numbers come from, and the fact that they bear no resemblance to each other suggests nobody knows. The one firm figure the paper relies on, the recommendation that children have no more than two hours of screen time a day, is a guideline for recreational screen time, and the paper admits on page 25 that it excludes educational use entirely.

A time limit also treats every minute on a screen as identical, so a lesson where students are building something is cut by exactly the same amount as one where they are watching YouTube. The paper's own main Australian study, by Arnup and Edwards at ANU, found that educational screen use was associated with higher achievement and that the worst outcomes came from passive use and social media, and the paper notes this on page 8 before carrying on as if it had never read it.

Evidence from somewhere else

Where the paper can't find evidence about classroom devices, it simply borrows some from somewhere else and hopes nobody checks. A New South Wales survey in which "87 per cent of principals say students are less distracted" after the phone ban becomes "87% of students are less distracted" in the paper's infographic, which turns the opinions of principals about their own department's policy into a fact about students, and a fact about phones at that. A brain-imaging study of 36 university students is used to argue that children should handwrite "from an early age". Statistics about cyberbullying, sexual harassment and image-based abuse on social media, on platforms that have been required to keep under-16s off since December 2025, are used to justify limiting how long a Year 5 class can spend on a tablet.

The taskforce

If you needed any confirmation that this paper is promising bureaucratic nonsense, look no further than the fact that alongside these policy decisions we get a Digital Detox Taskforce. It has been asked to "provide advice on further steps to address excessive screen time and digital device use", which means its conclusion was settled before it had even been formed. Led by an independent expert, it will be made up of representatives from state and territory governments, the Catholic and independent school sectors, parent and principal associations, workforce representatives and the national education agencies, ACARA, ESA, AERO and AITSL. In other words, the people responsible for the current system have been asked to work out what is wrong with it. At the same meeting, ministers agreed to merge those same four agencies into a new Australian Teaching and Learning Commission, so the system will be reviewing itself while it is reorganised into a larger version of itself.

The bigger problem

I wrote in my last essay that the ATAR rewards whatever is easiest to measure, and this paper is the same failure applied to technology. The system measures recall under exam conditions, so anything that lowers recall under exam conditions is labelled harmful, and minutes on a screen are easy to count, so minutes are what gets limited. The paper even reports that only 37 per cent of Year 10 students met the national ICT literacy standard in 2025, the lowest result ever recorded, and that 82 per cent of teachers say devices are important for building those skills, and its response is still to give students less time on devices.

The questions that actually matter are about the system itself: what students need to be able to do when they leave school, what assessment should look like when AI can complete most homework, and why a test taken alone, by hand and against the clock is still the main way we decide whether someone has learned anything. The paper asks none of them. A digital detox is a meaningless and damaging policy that will make the current measures look a little healthier for a while, and leave an education system in desperate need of fundamental change exactly as broken as it was.