What the letter asks for
On October 14, Health Professionals for Safer Screens, a campaign group founded in April 2024 by NHS family doctor Dr Rebecca Foljambe, published an open letter signed by 150 clinicians, spanning family doctors, paediatricians, ophthalmologists, audiologists, physiotherapists, and speech and language therapists. The letter, supported by the group SafeScreens, calls for physical and developmental health to be built into existing EdTech evaluation and procurement processes in English schools, rather than treated as a separate conversation handled after a product is already in classrooms.
The specific asks are concrete: health scrutiny before purchase, government guidance on daily screen and device exposure across both classwork and homework, explicit protections for students with special educational needs who may be steered toward screen-based activities with less adult supervision, and a check against procurement decisions driven purely by staffing or budget pressure. The group says it is willing to work directly with the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care to design the checks.
The case they are making, in numbers
The letter opens with scale: it puts annual EdTech spending in English schools at roughly 900 million pounds, spending the clinicians say has outpaced scrutiny of its cumulative health effects. It leans on a global analysis of 276 studies covering more than 5.4 million participants across 50 countries, which found myopia prevalence rose from about 24% in 1990 to almost 36% by 2023, and cites research linking each additional daily hour of screen time to a 21% increase in the odds of myopia.
The clinicians are careful about what they are not claiming. Their letter states plainly that it is 'not about rejecting technology in education,' and the cited figures describe screen exposure broadly rather than isolating the share attributable specifically to classroom devices or named EdTech products. The group also draws on UNESCO's 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report, which flagged limited independent evidence of EdTech's educational value and an over-reliance on supplier-produced research, a credibility gap the clinicians argue extends to health claims as well.
Why this is a procurement story, not just a health story
What makes this letter different from the recurring general debate about kids and screens is its target: the clinicians are not asking parents to limit home device use, they are asking for a specific gate inside institutional procurement. That reframes the issue from a parenting choice into a compliance requirement that would sit alongside the data-privacy, accessibility, and pedagogical-evidence checks most districts already run before signing an EdTech contract. It shifts responsibility onto the buyer's own evaluation process rather than onto individual households managing screen time after the device is already sent home.
It also broadens the scope beyond the smartphone-in-the-classroom fights that have dominated headlines. The letter explicitly names school-issued tablets, laptops, interactive whiteboards, and headphones, plus the learning platforms and content running on them, as in scope. That covers a much larger share of a typical school's technology budget than a phone-ban policy does, which means the commercial exposure for LMS vendors, tablet makers, and interactive-whiteboard suppliers is real even though none is named individually in the letter. A procurement director reading this letter should assume their entire device fleet, not just student phones, is the intended target.
The evidence gap this exposes
The clinicians' sharpest point may be structural rather than medical: no specific law currently requires an EdTech vendor to demonstrate, before a school buys its product, that cumulative use will not put children's physical health at risk. Pedagogical efficacy claims face some scrutiny through frameworks like the UK's Learning Engineering Tools Competition and similar evidence-standard pushes elsewhere, but physical and developmental health has largely sat outside that evaluation entirely, treated as a parenting or clinical issue rather than something a purchasing department is expected to check before signing a contract.
That gap matters because it has let the burden of proof default to the side with the least incentive to find problems. Vendors fund much of the existing research into their own products' educational value, the same dynamic UNESCO flagged, and nothing currently obligates an equivalent independent look at eye strain, posture, or sleep disruption tied to daily device use. The clinicians' proposal effectively asks government to set the evidence bar that the market has not set on its own, and to apply it before a contract is signed rather than years into a rollout once complaints have already accumulated.
What a serious procurement response looks like
For a school district, university, or corporate training department currently running RFPs for tablets, LMS platforms, or classroom hardware, the practical move is to add a health and ergonomics checklist to procurement now, rather than wait for the Department for Education to mandate one. That checklist should cover daily recommended usage limits by age band, display and blue-light specifications, posture and ergonomic guidance for device use, and accommodations for students with SEN who may spend more unsupervised time on a device than their peers.
Vendors that already have independent, non-supplier-funded evidence on these points will have a real advantage once this becomes a formal requirement, and procurement teams should start asking for that evidence in RFPs today rather than treating it as a box to check only after regulation arrives. Vendors without that evidence should expect to be asked for it soon, and the smart ones will commission it before a regulator or a losing RFP forces the issue.
The decision in front of you
This letter lands at a moment when EdTech procurement is already under pressure from AI-safety concerns, data-governance rules, and evidence-based purchasing mandates, and it will likely take time to translate into binding policy. Health and developmental risk is the next evaluation category likely to get formalized, and the 900 million pound figure the clinicians cite makes it hard for the Department for Education to simply file the letter away. Districts outside England should watch closely too, since UK procurement guidance tends to ripple into other markets' EdTech evaluation frameworks within a year or two.
The institutions that get ahead of this will treat health evidence as a standard RFP line item starting with their next device or platform refresh, not as a response to a future mandate. The ones that wait will be negotiating compliance retroactively across an entire existing device fleet, which is a far more expensive and disruptive position than building the requirement into the next procurement cycle now. Given how slowly most school hardware refreshes turn over, a decision made this year will likely still be in classrooms when the Department for Education's eventual guidance actually lands.
