Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the member for Cowan for putting this motion before the House. When you buy a textbook now, the norm is generally to have access to the textbook in an online form. The recent World Innovation Summit for Education global survey predicts that books will, largely, have been replaced by online learning by 2030, in 15 years time. And what the member for Cowan has identified is the fact that that is the direction of education, going more and more towards online learning, and yet schoolkids are carrying bags that are much heavier than the correct, appropriate weight. And from my own family experience, the kids often carry not just one bag but two or three. Spinal pain is one of the most costly and disabling problems affecting adults in industrialised countries. Most population based surveys of back pain record a one-year prevalence of 50 per cent and a lifetime prevalence of between 60 and 80 per cent, which is concerning in terms of the loss of productivity, healthcare costs, and personal pain and suffering.

Disability from back pain places a significant burden on the individual and their community. Back problems are the leading specific musculoskeletal cause of health system spending in Australia. Adolescents have been repeatedly identified around the world as suffering from spinal pain. From an Australian perspective, approximately 50 per cent of adolescents tend to report spinal pain—that is, either neck or lower back pain. There is a strong association between adolescent lower back pain, particularly for young people in the rapid years of spinal growth—that is, 12 to 14 years for girls and 13 to 16 years for boys—and repeatedly carrying heavy school backpacks. Growing numbers of children are developing back problems because of the weight of the bags that they carry to school. Doctors are reporting a rise in the cases of spinal abnormalities in students, including disfiguring curvatures, such as scoliosis. One potential source of the problem is overloaded schoolbags that are up to double the size of those carried 10 years ago.

Students routinely carry bags filled with heavy books, laptops, sports kit and packed lunches. The Chiropractors' Association of Australia has raised concerns about backpack trends amongst school children and the potential long-term damage that could be caused by overladen and ill-fitting bags. According to the CAA, 90 per cent of school children have bad posture when carrying their bags and could experience spinal damage as a result. The CAA surveyed 346 students in Adelaide and 400 parents weighed their children's bags. They found weights of up to 17 per cent of a student's body weight in the bag; the average was 6.6 kilograms. Now health experts say children risk long-term and ultimately permanent damage if they regularly carry more than 10 per cent of their body weight over their shoulders. And that recommendation has been around since 1977.

Putting too much stress on a child's back at such an important stage of growth and development will result in serious spinal problems both immediately and later on in life. Some of the problems caused by bad posture at an early age include reduced mobility, early degeneration of bones and joints, increased vulnerability to injuries and unhealthy pressures on a child's nervous system.

The advances in technology give us an opportunity to significantly reduce this weight, by converting reference materials into removable CDs, thumb drives, other media and even allowing licensed web-based access to their reference materials. Some schools are already addressing this problem by replacing textbooks completely with iPads and e-texts.

I would like to commend the member for Cowan on raising this important issue. Let's hope that we see some movement in the school sector, to move with the times and make sure that children are not carrying heavy backpacks.

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