Opinion: School behaviour apps are the last thing pupils need

Not too long ago, I sat in classes taught by teachers excited by the magic of PowerPoints, quietly mourning the death of the overhead projector. How quaint that all seems now, in the age of an iPad in every pupil’s hands.

Having a school-age relative opens you up to the weird world of the modern classroom, where kids never seem to escape. Not even a decade ago, hometime was hometime: do your homework, hand it in, done. “See you tomorrow,” said school. “We’re glad to be rid of you.”

Now, with push notifications and the expectation of instant reachability, education follows you home. Over the last decade, classroom tech has marched on. And like a school marching band, it’s confused, poorly coordinated, and not very good.

Introducing the paranoid nightmare for 2025: a phone app giving parents and pupils constant updates on behaviour, ensuring every bad decision is on permanent record. All translated into pretty graphs showing exactly how awful you are, and when. Yes, there are positive points—but no one looks at those. It’s all about the negative.

Even within the conversation raging since Netflix's Adolescence over the mental health of children thanks to technology, scant references are ever given to this alarming amount of pressure thrown at children every day.

Middle managers love metrics, and school bureaucrats are no different. Tracking pupil behaviour isn’t new. Back in my day, schools had internal systems. Teachers kept notes. Sometimes, your parents saw it—if you were “lucky.” It wasn’t open access, it wasn’t constant, and I never saw it. I wasn’t a rebel, but I’m sure I’d have been crushed reading what teachers said about me. We all would.

The system I’ve seen works like this: teachers give points for good or bad behaviour. Do something good—plus one. Do something bad—minus one. Every action is scored the same, and you only get one point at a time. Somehow, it’s even stupider than it sounds. Not bringing a pencil is equal to punching someone in the face—something that, I hear, happens more than you’d like.

Kids will always play up, push boundaries. It’s part of growing up. Everyone was like that whether they admit it or not. Children are, for the most part, awful to each other. Learning not to be is a life skill. Something from last week shouldn’t hang over them, let alone something from last year. But like everything online, once it’s there, it’s there forever.

My heart sank when I first saw the app's behaviour graph. A pie chart—one of the worst ways to model anything—that sums up every right and wrong choice you’ve made. There are more graphs, too, showing exactly when your child acted up, complete with bullet point descriptions.

This isn’t harmless. Especially not for struggling students. A pie chart of misery doesn’t encourage change. It tells them they’ll always be defined by their worst moments.

The last 25 years of behavioural psychology shows that public, permanent negative reinforcement can entrench bad behaviour. Kids constantly told they’re bad often internalise the label and live down to it. They get written off—sometimes at just 12 years old.

Some vendors even brag about public shaming—sorry, “encouraging good behaviour”—via live on-screen updates. The biggest platforms let teachers give points for home behaviour too, leaving students no chance to escape.

It’s an unfortunate truth: teachers have the same biases we all do. Let’s not pretend some won’t have it in for annoying pupils. Loud, disruptive kids rack up negatives, while a quieter but equally disengaged one slips by. And that’s without getting into deeper biases.

Worst of all, behaviour management has been gamified. It’s now a numbers game—points instead of discipline, alienating students on the fringes. Obedient kids rake in the rewards, while impulsive or unconventional ones—often our most creative—get left behind. A bad day from three years ago stays with you forever.

This clashes with 21st-century education policy that says every pupil is more than a number. These systems wipe away context, boiling everything down to a single figure.

The result? A strange paradox: school becomes so overreaching, so ever-present, that kids tune it out. There's too much to notice, so they notice nothing. It becomes background noise. And that’s no good—especially for students already on the edge.

These systems aren’t national; it’s down to local authorities. Some schools have had them for years, some are trying them out. The school I know is giving it up at the end of the year—and rightly so. You can’t judge kids like this and expect better results. It ignores everything else kids have dealt with in the last ten years—COVID, social media, cyberbullying, and school invading their homes. Something’s got to give, and it can’t be our burned-out pupils.