Kids too anxious to go to school can now send a £3,500 robot instead, letting them sit in on lessons from home. The Mail has the story:
The AV1 robot has a camera, microphone and speaker enabling a child at home to see, hear and speak to classmates via an app.
More than 2,000 are being used nationwide, many by children with “emotionally based school avoidance”, or EBSA – a chronic refusal to go to school driven by anxiety.
Teachers place the robot on the child’s usual desk and ask them questions as though they were there, while the pupil at home can simply reply, as well as swipe their screen to turn the robot’s head through 360 degrees.
A ‘whisper mode’ lets the absent pupil speak quietly to a classmate sitting beside the robot, rather than letting the whole room hear.
The camera is one-way, so the pupil at home can see and hear the lesson without being seen.
The robot was developed by Norwegian firm No Isolation, initially to keep children in hospital connected to their classrooms.
Last year Devon County Council bought 16 robots for pupils who struggle to attend because of “worry, anxiety and overwhelm”.
The authority is one of at least 80 to have taken the AV1 since the Department for Education commissioned it in 2019. The robots are used for EBSA pupils in areas including Somerset, Dorset and Haringey and Islington in London, according to council documents seen by the Mail on Sunday. …
The number of severely absent pupils with additional “social, emotional and mental health” needs has more than tripled in six years, from 8,453 to 27,442. A record 151,000 pupils missed at least half their schooling last year, from a pre-pandemic low of 60,247.
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I’m sure teachers love them.
Much better to deal with a polite robot than an child with “anxiety”.
What are they going to do when they have to leave school?
I guess it’s stay in their bedrooms and watch their screens all day.
making up a pseudo psychological name for complete lack of social skills is not going to help anyone.
The covid fiasco damaged a generation of children beyond what was imagined by the evil so and so’s that perpetuated it.
Now, instead of reintroducing them to society and how to behave in company, they are quite happy to keep them isolated for ever.
Wickdness does not even begin to describe it.
I look forward to these devices as a stand-in on dates when they are a bit older, and I won’t speclulate further about what they will be asked to do as a relationship develops.
They’ll be Trans at the flick of a switch.
This is not a robot, it is a hi-res baby monitor.
We should be encouraging these children to remove the badges that the ‘care vultures’ have given them (EBSA, my arse), and get them back to school, or a school, or any school. Facilitating the exclusion of kids from society is evil. Encouraging fragility and self-destructive behaviours likewise. Who is this actually helping.?
Yes, it’s as if the government are stealthily continuing the Covid Lockdowns which caused tremendous psychological and developmental harm to children. They just changed the name to “Anxiety”.
Hmm, not sure it’s entirely healthy that they can’t be seen. When we have Teams calls for work we strongly encourage cameras on, and it’s generally the case that staff who habitually have their cameras off are the least engaged on the calls and in work generally