Having spent a day at a conference about well-being, listening to some distinguished and well-known speakers in the field and chatting with colleagues working in education and young people’s support services, I was struck by the number of misunderstandings or misconceptions founded in scientific research that pervade education debates.

Misconceptions that Annette Taylor (2017) calls “neuromyths”, although are often founded in a grain of truth – or at least some findings for psychological or neurological research.  I still regularly hear people talk about, “only using 10% or our brain”, or “classroom environments need to be full of rich stimuli to improve children’s brains”, when these misunderstand or misrepresent the findings of the studies which they cite as evidence.  For me, the problem arises when information about matters such as learning or child development are taken out of context or compressed into simplified over-generalisations.

Once the message is passed down from researchers, to journalists, to trainers, authors and speakers, to teachers and parents, the science behind the idea is often lost, or at best distorted.  At times, this oversimplification can turn into a slogan – which becomes even more difficult to challenge as it is in danger of becoming part of our accepted wisdom.  This is without pressure groups and those with fixed viewpoints cherry-picking evidence from research to bolster their case, without looking at the broad evidence-base.

Let’s take the ‘children need busy stimulating environments to maximise their learning’ argument as an example. The evidence for this is founded largely in animal studies of sensory deprivation and case studies of children who had experienced extreme isolation, both of which suggested that deprivation leads to a lack of development.  Some then extrapolated these findings to argue that humans needs ‘enriched environments’ in order to thrive.

In reality, classrooms, whether brightly decorated or not, would never be environments of deprivation or of significant social isolation. Quite the opposite at All Hallows!  In fact, we are beginning to suspect very visually noisy and stimulating classrooms may actually lead to a decrease in learning for some pupils, due to the potential for distraction (Fisher et al., 2014), though this remains an indicator for inspectors when making judgements about learning.

I believe that whilst we need to be evidence-based in our thinking and decision-making, we should engage with research findings critically, considering any agendas at work, the specific contexts of our schools and families, our own fundamental beliefs and the knowledge that there is rarely a single ‘truth’ when we are dealing with human beings.  Life would be far less exciting as a teacher, Head or a psychologist, if young people all reacted in the same way to identical stimuli or environments!