Well spoken we need more teachers like this great Lady

This lady is slightly wasted on the kids she should have rooms full of adults and the UK might stand a chance of not becoming a banana republic

I wish I'd heard this from Mrs Birbalsingh about six years ago. Excellent information.

Children learn by copying. They see their parents constantly on their phones , so the children copy. If they are fortunate enough to have parents who read, they are more likely to read themselves.

Another problem is children seeing their parents constantly on their phones ... you very often see children trying to attract their parents' attention and getting none because their parents are absorbed with their phones.

My little Grandson is 3 and can already read and count, children can learn at an earlier age than a lot of people think.

My 15 year old son still doesn't have a phone, and so far has not asked for one either. I remember having to ask my parents if I could use the phone to call friends and I do not remember ever being allowed to do so. I would be asked "Did you see your friend today?" "yes", "Will you see them tomorrow?" "yes" ,"Then you do not need to use the phone to just call them for a chat". I always thought I was hard done by, but in the big scheme of things my parents were right, I didn't need to b totally entangled in other people's lives even at that age.

100% agreed with that. Kids should have very minimal phone time. They are so bad for their education, social life and they all become self obsessed with getting likes

“If he had been reading books, he would have been able to use the word ‘engage’. “ Wow, i love this woman. Her passion as an educator is so palpable. And she even gave us an image to hold on to when it really gets tough when dealing with our kids with regards the use of a phone. Russell Crowe in gladiator shouting “Hold the line!”

I love love this amazing Lady!

She sounds like the sort of teacher that every kid should have at school

It disgusts me to see toddlers who can barely walk, holding phones while in prams. Parents have given over control, education, discipline and rearing of their kids to others. They are being groomed, manipulated, brainwashed and having things forced onto them, by those with certain agendas and particular motives, and being an attached slave to the phone is only a small part of it.

She should be the PM, and ALL the rest of the government !!!!!!! She is brilliant !!!!

Brilliant teacher

It’s not just reading , it’s also making stuff , using their hands to create and build ! Have always been suspicious of the internet and social media in particular and believe it to be the main reason that IQ is on a downturn. Katherine is passionate as we’re many of the teachers when I was growing up in the 60’s .

i held back phones from my kids for so long, and when they got one they are not allowed to use it for the internet, only text and calls, that now they finally have one they forget it, it's on vibrate and they don't hear it, they just aren't attached to it. even my 16yo only uses it w his friends to text them or look at memes together. hold it back for as long as possible! the hard work will pay off. print out the bus schedule. plan ahead.

What a se nsible teacher more like her is needed

What a smart lady, no wonder her school has long waiting list.

Birbalsingh is a national treasure in my opinion. my kids will not have any social media till they are at least 16.

Love her

WELL SAID THAT TEACHER, THEY NEED MORE LIKE HER IN SCHOOLS......

Common sense, why aren't all teachers and parents aware of this, simple .🧐

KB, an absolute treasure!

depends on what you are given to read. the stuff they tell you to read in school really is a punishment

Spot on that lovely little lady thanks for your help and insights and hopefully these parents will sit up and listen to this lady take notice this govts are try to dumb your kids down 👇 don't let them do you understand that hay?

Katherine is marvellous, Poor parenting is the problem. You don't need to be a monster or get all emotional about it, you just need to be sensible and mentor your kids. Neither of mine had phones until they were past 16 - end of. It is a matter of teaching self-discipline and self-reliance. They turned out perfectly fine with healthy social lives.

Good to see Katharine. Brick phone all the way. You don’t need a smart phone 📱 to talk to people.

Amen 🙏 16 so true I like this women attitude to learning children

A 13-year-old with a phone? A question we need to ask ourselves: If these technological devices are part of the progress into the future, what exactly are we progressing towards?

Get your kids out of these holding pens and home school.

My grandson was sent to the principal's office from his first day of school. He was read to from birth. He was in such trouble until their parents & teachers worked together. One of his punishments was doing his school work at home, plus homework. His reading was behind, so his next punishment for bad/disrupting behaviour was no toys, only books. By the end of the year he was ahead in reading. Love this woman. No phones after nine or during meals. And your children will love you because you didn't buy their respect & love.

So true phones becomes there little friend

It's not a brave parent is a strong responsible parent

I’m an international teacher and love Katharine! I was speaking with an adult student who is a learning disabilities specialist. I asked her opinion on all the babies I see with a screen while mum plays on her phone. The learning disabilities expert said, “it will give them autism.” She explained that the strip of skin down the centre of the brain thins when exposed to screens. She said no child under 2 should be exposed to a screen.

A rare inspirational lady.....

Who need “friends” who make one’s’ lives less? The need for “friends” I.e. peer pressure, is over exaggerated. Imagine a child is emotionally strong enough to stand out with his own values/believes/self disciplines, what sophistication he could achieve in his adulthood. Tremendous work n heartaches for parents , but no one else will do the job for you. Besides, why do parents want someone else to do their job for them? Think about why so many are doing homeschooling.

Look at the parents, if the kids are reluctant to read their parents are probably as thick as two short planks, apples don't fall too far from the tree!

I was always frustrated that when my boys were at school, teachers always referred them to the internet for research/information rather than encouraging them to read reference books, etc. We had a range of reference books, which we tried to encourage them to use for homework, but they rarely did, even though they were avid readers when they were young. If they don't use books, I think they don't develop the skills of reading, analysing, sifting, and summarising information in the same way, as they can't just copy and paste, etc. Ours didn't have smart phones until they were in their teens around 14/15.

"Reluctancy to reading" is very bad English. There's no such word as reluctancy because the word reluctance already exists. "Reading" is the infinitive form. "Seeing is believing" and "to see is to believe" are equivalent. "To reading" is nonsense.

I didn't have a phone into I was 19 and I'm fine. You find it the buses timetable before it's that simple

Sound advise from this lady.

That is true books are way nicer and comfortable plus when you put your phone away you don’t have messages bothering you when you read that is why I am learning lots of things to

Love this lady! We are living in a world where parents are scared of their children when it should be the other way around.

4:18 *unsupervised access to the internet puts your child's life in danger* - so does living, ironically 😂😂😂

we never had phones or tablets and i hated reading books still do

It has been proven that these phones are equal to any drug also social media has the same effect I absolutely agree an age limit should be applied to phones and social media God bless us all

My lady! 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

A std' phone with just text/calls offer al the comms' children may need at their time of life. I'm 52 and my phone has never been on the net - that's what my PC is for... Leave the net for when you get home or PC's in class... Curiously, all kids do when at home on their phones/PC is get in touch with their friends they've just spent all day with in school !!

Discipline is the key to great success in schools, all mobile phones should be switched off until the end of the school day.

Surely if kids got to be able to read even on the internet!

4:10 *you give them your phone for half an hour, that's their reward* - Jeez, more Skinner's Operant Conditioning, Katherine. This is 2023, we understand psychology better than experiments done on pigeons and rats over 70 years ago.

It isn’t just a problem for children. I don’t have a mobile phone because I value my freedom and my privacy. I also notice the world of life going on around me unlike the hordes of adult slaves to the phone who waste their lives on these noxious pieces of plastic.

I train adults in a business - it used to be that day one was about making myself heard over the sound of a group of adults getting to know each other and forming new bonds. Now I have to coax them to talk to each other. Some of them argue in their defence that they are texting each other .... from adjacent seats! And I also have to teach actual adults fundamental communication skills, as if they were in a remedial class! Screen-bound kids become socially incompetent adults.

What if someone tries to gran you're child outside of school and you're kid needs to phone you or the police cause they are in danger?

3:14 *I would say take the phone away* - oh, phones are the problem? Not your ineptitude to give your child books that relate to them, they are interested in, and that support their intrinsic motivation to read?

Katharine is great, and I agree with her on smartphones. But this attitude has been there for a while. When I was at school in the 70’s and struggling to find any interest in football, my games teacher would threaten to send me back into the changing rooms where I could ‘spend the rest of the time reading a book!’ - as if that was a punishment. Considering it was freezing on the the football pitch and I was usually on the ‘tops off’ team with my nipples frozen hard like rivets, it was bliss.

It’s convenient for some parents to put their child in front of a screen

Probably being made to read gender studies literature.

But reading upsets people. Authors in the past used hurty words.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👌👌👍👍

The govt ,Corporate buisness want everything done by Apps ,even the NHS,

No teacher taught me anything I didn't want to learn

We have bred a generation of smart phone brats, I'm with the headteacher here.

"Strictest"? I'd say: the most wise and realist.

school is just inverted now.

No phone for my daughter until her frontal lobe is formed. I’m going all the way. Ps my daughter gets through a huge book in 5 days and her imagination is incredible. Please parents ditch the phone idea. It’s a waste of their time and ruins focus.

NO they will start making them learn stuff soon

Advice to schools. Change the material you are teaching our children.

Literacy is the foundation of a real education. No child should make it very far through elementary school without knowing and understanding this implicitly. Otherwise they're almost being handed a free license to be truant - or whatever equivalent to that is most appropriate. Which means uneducated. Kids growing up with no relationship to books at all - are deprived of one the most valuable things they'll every experience. A book is by definition a very private exercise - between the reader and the author. Conversely - social media is invasive to the max. That's just how it is. I've never been surprised in the least, by Katharine's attack on screen devices. She knows how they do not mix with a real education, and in fact, how they can prevent it from happening. Are all kids prey to this? Of course not. Some kids can do both quite well. What percentage of the whole this is, is hard to measure. But the unlucky ones who lose out - wind up becoming unknowledgeable dummies. Sorry - but the evidence of this is everywhere. When I was a kid, the big bad screen was TV. That was all. I craved more screen time than I got. When books landed in my life like a landslide/avalanche at the age of 9, I almost instantly became a bookworm. Because I liked reading, and the main reason why I liked reading was because I liked what was in the books that I read. They were not a titanic struggle to wallow through. They were a siren call to find out what happened next. The point is - they could easily compete with TV. Or movies. Or just about anything - although I still spent every minute outdoors that I could. Nobody will ever convince me that a positive relationship with books is not essential to the educational development of a child. You can't have the real thing without books. And there is one other thing , a dark thing, that too many supposedly intelligent adult conversations leave out of this discussion: The damned things are addictive. And not in a nice way. Users themselves will admit to this. Even Katharine has related stories of some of her own students admitting to it. People removed (for whatever reason) from smartphone use - look like chain smokers obsessed with their next cigarette. Jumpy. Fidgety. Distracted. Anxious. By habit, they just don't like being in places where they have to put their phone away. The sad thing is, often what they're addicted to has no real value in their life. They're monitoring their social media life in a virtual reality setting. It is not reality at all. Not in there. Reality is out here in the real world. That "real" world is an artificially created illusion. Which is maybe why so many young people now have so much trouble with fact based, scientifically proven truth. Or the idea that 2 and 2 do make 4 and only 4. And so we monitor the casualties. Kids who are kids long past their shelf life. Kids whose social skills in real life are a bloody mess. Kids who don't really know anything, don't know how to follow a train of thought, don't know how to think critically, don't know how to sort their way through an acquired body of knowledge. Or to understand a simple concept. The ones I always got a kick out of (as shocking as it is) were the "geographically challenged" ones. Barely capable of understanding the difference between right and left hand. Or the concept of a point on the compass (direction.) I could go on, but I should stop. "Smart" phones and education are completely antithetical to each other.

KB carpet-bombing with truth, as usual.

She'll never take the title from Miss Fritton aka Alastair Simm.

Just be very careful that you don't insist that a pupil must read out loud in front of the class when they have a speech defect. Some pupils have great difficulty with it. Reading, yes. Reading out loud? Be careful, teachers.

What about the woke books they are forced to read, primary school kids reading about 2 dads and tranies

“Why do children see reading as a hassle, a distraction” hmmm, undiagnosed ADHD or Dyslexia maybe?

Giving a young children is lazy parenting!

As one of the previous comments pointed out the peoblem is some parents struggle to parent their children for a variety of reasons Children develop much faster when bonding with one of the parents over a book Even before children can talk they love a story book at bedrime or any time with pictures and sounds made by the parent perhaps this is why some children struggle learning ? there just not getting the bezt start at home ? Very sad and preventable

Surely reading is racist?

Reluctant: Thick.

We need more strict teachers like this lady kids today know full well that the law now they can get away with anything they want ...and since disciplining children has been more or less banned has anyone else noticed violence escalating stabbings too is going through the roof with young kids ..wen we were kids we were disciplined we wudnt dare even talk back to an adult now look at what's happened kids are out of control in today's society and it's getting worse every couple of years

9:23 *everytime I would get on twitter* - the hypocrisy lol

5:54 *we sell brick phones at our school* - ah, capitalism/education/capitalism/education, I don't know the difference anymore!

5:46 *that is about your worries, not real worries* - 😂 so... I'm not real?!😩

5:58 *most importantly, they will not have access to the internet* - heaven forbid, they see an opinion different to yours!

5:31 *you are inviting people into your living room who you would never normally speak to* - 😂😂😂 Having a phone doesn't mean I'm inviting anyone in my living room, Katherine. Unless I met them on Tinder 🤣🤣

9:43 *I can do what I'm good at, which is telling people what they need to hear* - oh right, you decide what people "need to hear" do you? Of course, you know better than everyone else?

4:22 *every undesirable has access to your child* - We're living in a Harry Potter book!

2:25 *and the parents who follow our advice, their children are always in the top set, always excelling* - according to EEF, setting and streaming has no impact on academic achievement.

9:32 *by speaking the truth* - it's your opinion, your perspective; knowledge ≠ reality

10:05 *hold the line* - been listening to TOTO, Katherine?

4:26 *they know where they live, they know where they go to school, they know who there friends are, they know what they enjoy, and they know how to groom them* - Only if you put that information on the internet?! Don't put the information on the internet if you don't want people to know?! Use an alias?

0:40 *it is because of the smart phones and access to the internet* - or maybe it's because they're forced to read texts in school that have no relevance to their life? They don't relate to the characters? They don't relate to the plot? Being forced to do something you're not interested in, nor see the point for, makes it seem like a punishment.

1:38 *generally speaking, if you are inundating your children with screen time, they will never learn to love reading* - again, correlation ≠ causation. Look at intrinsic motivation if you're interested supporting your child to love reading.

1:07 *if you want your child to love reading, you must decrease the amount of screen* - screen time?! Correlation ≠ causation. Look at intrinsic motivation if you're interested supporting your child to love reading.

3:08 *they don't know what it is to read* - who are you to tell everyone 'what it is to read'? Again, correlation ≠ causation. Look at intrinsic motivation if you're interested supporting your child to love reading.

5:36 *your child is mixing in a world, that you have no idea what they're getting up to* - hmm, maybe you could ask, "what you upto?", then you might have an idea?

2:47 *the only way you can improve your reading is through writing* - False dichotomy #1

Smartphones are a necessity; expecting kids to use brick phones like the cavemen is ridiculous. I use my smartphone for audible and own a kindle; I haven't touched a paper book in over a decade. This woman is living in the 50s.

1:28 *if children can choose entertainment between a book and a screen, they will always choose a screen* - Not true, how condescending. Have you seen the film Matilda? My niece chooses books over screens. I hate screens, I hate this laptop, I hate responding to your propaganda but it's important for people to hear a different perspective so I do it lol

I blame the immigrants.

The BAME community have their own version of side show Bob.