Dr. Sara Dockrell:

While we are talking about parents, teachers and schools being responsible, I would also include children, especially in secondary school. Children should be just as much involved in producing guidelines. While we can work on guidelines for parents and ways of delivering them, children need to be involved too through, say, school projects. They are innovative and probably have solutions to the problem themselves. They are the user group that is missing in the debate.

On the baseline for pain, it is a confounding problem when one assesses the level of pain of children. If one asks any group of children at any point in time if they suffer pain, there is a large prevalence. When we asked 529 children to identify where they felt pain on a body discomfort chart, they told us. It is sometimes difficult to tease out what is and is not schoolbag-related pain. Feeling some pain is not the end of the world for children. They get on with it and play sports. They hurt their feet, fall, trip or bang their heads. We should not get overly anxious about this. Children suffer some discomfort when they carry schoolbags, but there is no evidence that long-term damage is done to their backs or other parts of their bodies as a result. Schoolbag carriage tends to be of short duration. In agreement with research findings from all over the world, we found schoolchildren tended to carry schoolbags for less than ten minutes at a time. It is not a serious issue, although I understand it is a concern when one sees a child under duress in carrying a bag.

I agree that manual handling should be part of what children learn. It is done in the workplace and well legislated for. The difficulty is that children are not employees of the Department of Education and Skills. As they are not sick either, they are not taken care of by the Department of Health. The matter falls between two stools. That said, there is definitely scope to make children more aware and train them to deal with the issue themselves.

It is also about educating them on the best way to carry their schoolbags. I am not suggesting for one minute that they carry very heavy loads, but that is not the main issue. There are many factors involved. When we looked at and analysed it thoroughly, we found that there would be no merit in recommending a weight guideline. We will not be able to legislate to impose weight limits, either in absolute terms or relative to the size of the child. We will not be able to come up with guidelines over which we would be able to stand.

The idea of having e-books is interesting. I am aware of a survey that found that there was no significant difference in the weight of the schoolbags of children who attended e-schools, that is, schools that used iPads. In that sense, e-books are not the answer. Perhaps the technology is not being used properly, but their use has not made a significant difference. Furthermore, there is more evidence of musculoskeletal problems arising from technology use than from carrying schoolbags. Therefore, we need to be very careful in that regard. We cannot go down the route of scrapping schoolbags and telling children only to use laptops, tablets or iPads because there are proven problems with their use.