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UK school confiscates PlayStations,Xboxes from students' homes- 11-Apr-2017
London: Game Over! One of the UK's top schools has taken to confiscating Xboxes, PlayStations and mobiles from pupils' homes in order to improve their behaviour and exam results.
King Solomon Academy (KSA), in Marylebone, west London, has seized the gaming devices on occasions from some pupils with their parents' consent.
The measure was introduced to encourage good behaviour and exam grades, according to Max Haimendorf, the principal.
"What has happened more than once is that the parent has come into the school and said, 'I do not want my child using this. I want you to keep it until they are better behaved,'" he told The Sunday Times.
Haimendorf said the parents might either agree to a "symbolic" confiscation of the item or bring it into the school and give it to staff.
The academy's radical approach to an issue that has become a battleground for parents concerned by the effect of unlimited screen time and computer games on their children is revealed in a new book by Barnaby Lenon, the former headmaster of Harrow School, published this month.
In 'Much Promise', Lenon singles out KSA as a model for other secondary schools and writes that the school's deputy head "confiscates games consoles from pupils' homes".
On one visit to KSA, one of several academies run by Ark, an educational charity, Lenon saw a heap of consoles in the corner of the deputy head's office.
Haimendorf has pioneered a model in which the school acts almost as a second family, working with parents to improve teenagers' behaviour, wellbeing and performance.
"Where specific children have said, 'I have been up late playing PlayStation' or 'up late on the internet', there definitely have been circumstances where (they) have been clearly exhausted in classrooms," Haimendorf said.
In such cases, the school would hold a meeting with parents to "talk through the impact of their child spending that time doing that thing".
Lenon praised Haimendorf's approach.
"Having worked in a boarding school most of my life, I was always confiscating games consoles if boys were spending too much time misusing them and not doing their homework, or staying up late to play games and getting too little sleep," Lenon said.
"I have come across schools in which boys have stayed up all night to play games like Call of Duty across time zones. Parents need to be helped by schools to set limits on children's use of these devices," he said.
He added that computer game violence was another problem.
"That is why it is great when schools like KSA make it easier for parents to enforce mutually agreed policies," Lenon said.
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