Thetford Academy Principal Michael Fordham reflects on the changing times and whether writing by hand still has an important place in modern education.
Being left-handed has always been my excuse. As all my students will tell you from deciphering my scribbles on a whiteboard, my handwriting is not good. Even at school, my handwriting was a mess, and being a history undergraduate, where I was required to write three essays in three hours in exam conditions, resulted in a further deterioration, as I wrote fast but without technique.
Of course, by university it was too late. What I really needed was to get my handwriting sorted in the early years of primary school. Being left-handed is not an excuse: there are plenty of left-handers with quite beautiful handwriting. I have a strong suspicion that once I had got the basics of letter formation, I just wanted to crack on and write, whereas what I probably needed was lots more practice to make it fluent.
It has become all the harder today. When I started at primary school in the late 1980s, there were no computers in classrooms, and a flat device that connected you to a global communications network was essentially something out of Star Trek. Now, a quarter of the way into this century, most children spend far more time writing with their thumbs on a screen than they do with a pen.
Some argue that this is not an issue. For years there have been growing demands to have exams on computers, and there is precious little handwriting needed in employment today. So do we just ‘write off’ handwriting as a relic of the past, or do we double down on it as something that still matters in the modern world?
For me, I do not think handwriting is defunct: the pen connects us to the page in a way that a digital device does not. Writing by hand is a form of human expression that has developed over millennia, and losing it would be to the detriment of our culture.
Michael Fordham – Principal, Thetford Academy
