Drawing pins or staples: which are better for sticking up pupils’ work? That used to be as vicious as the debate around display boards got. Pin critics would highlight the risk of having to pick one out of a sobbing child’s hand, while staple haters lamented the time spent digging into display boards to remove the handiwork of gun-wielding zealots.

But then the kickback against displays began, and we had another fight on our hands: whether displays should exist at all.

The push to remove displays is, according to its supporters, evidence based. For a start, there is cognitive load theory (CLT) - the influential theory that says limits on children’s working memory mean non-essential information must be minimised if they are to learn effectively. Some teachers have argued that displays clearly contribute to the extraneous load that we impose on our learners, and they advocate removing them from pupils’ eyelines.

There is other research to support that position, too: one study of US kindergarten children found they were “more distracted by the visual environment, spent more time off task and demonstrated smaller learning gains when the walls were highly decorated than when the decorations were removed”.

Anna Fisher, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania who was a researcher on that paper, explains why displays can distract: “Attention is a competitive process and only a subset of information can be selected for processing and represented in working memory.”

But display board advocates are not shifting: they seem determined to safeguard the use of boards until their very last staple (or pin). So is there actually a convincing case to keep those boards, considering the teacher workload implications of using them? Let’s peel an alternative reading of displays off the wall and have a look at it in detail.

The role of displays in the classroom has been “a continual and ever-present concern in the history of schooling”, says Catherine Burke, emerita professor of the history of education at the University of Cambridge and co-editor of The Decorated School: essays on the visual culture of schooling. She argues that you have to view them holistically, not simply as a tool for learning.

For example, when it comes to cognitive load theory, Burke says that “learning is only one part of education, and memorising facts, tasks and processes only one part of learning” - and that displays have had “many functions over time”.

Some of those functions were highlighted in the Clever Classrooms study, a major research project published by University of Salford researchers in 2015 that sought to measure the impact of environment on learning. It found that differences in the physical characteristics of classrooms explained 16 per cent of the “variation in learning progress” for 3,700 pupils involved in the study.

The researchers found that the most important factors influencing the physical environment were “naturalness” (in light, temperature and air quality), “individualisation” (achieved through pupil “ownership” and “flexibility”) and an appropriate level of “stimulation” (achieved through “complexity and colour”).

The researchers looked at displays as part of their “visual complexity” sub-field and started off by thinking that a highly visually stimulating environment would be a pure benefit to pupils, says Peter Barrett, emeritus professor of property and construction management at Salford and the lead researcher on the project, who specialises in studying the link between school design and academic progress.

But the data showed that “progress in learning peaked at a mid-level of visual complexity and it dropped if it was either too complex or too simple”, adds Barrett, an honorary fellow in the department of education at the University of Oxford.

When a display is at a “natural level where you don’t notice it explicitly, it’s not using up your cognitive capacity, it’s actually making you feel comfortable”, he says. “If it was less or more, your brain starts to think, ‘What’s going on?’ I think it’s quite a fundamental human thing: if there’s nothing going on [in the background], it doesn’t feel right.”

As for Barrett, it’s not a question of tearing down your display boards, rather fine-tuning them and using them in moderation to ensure that your classroom doesn’t feel uncomfortably odd at one extreme or oppressive at the other.

“The argument that you should make a classroom so bare that it’s not distracting - I think it’s taking it too far,” he says.

Barrett adds that boards can bring other benefits to the classroom. The study found that “a classroom that includes pupil-created work in displays will provide a sense of ownership” and “a classroom that is distinctly different (using displays) creates a sense of familiarity” for pupils. People incline towards “individualisation” of a space, and displays have a role here, says Barrett. “We like choice and we also like to put our mark on a space and feel ownership of it.”

Burke highlights further roles that displays have traditionally played. Sometimes their deployment has been “influenced by ideas about the nature or condition of childhood”, including “the inclination of young children towards collecting” or their “responsiveness to art and artefacts”, she says.

Displays, she adds, have also been used by teachers “to reflect the achievements of pupils, boosting self-esteem”.

The three-year ethnographic study of a UK primary school by University of Nottingham researchers found that displays provided for children “the resources, not for learning ‘school stuff ’ but for the construction of a narrative of experience of schooling that was peppered with excitement, enjoyment and a sense of individual and collective achievement”.

And displays have played a role in the push for schools “to market themselves to prospective parents” (one for the heads, there) and in reflecting the “so-called values or ethos of the school”, Burke adds.

In terms of practical guidance on how to get displays right, the Clever Classrooms report suggests that to avoid displays becoming visually “chaotic”, as “a rule of thumb, 20-50 per cent of the available wall space should be kept clear” of displays.

Barrett says that displays should be “reinforcing what’s happening in the class pedagogically” and need to be approached with thought, “rather than as just a knee-jerk reaction”.

Still not convinced? Well, interestingly, even some of the researchers who warn against display-heavy classrooms aren’t advocating their total removal.

Karrie Godwin, associate professor in psychology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and one of the co-authors on the US paper cited earlier, says: “Although our research suggests that highly decorated environments are suboptimal for attention and learning, we don’t yet know what constitutes an optimal visual learning environment. It is possible that moderate amounts of displays could be ideal, perhaps providing visual stimulation without overwhelming children’s developing attention regulation. This is a question we are currently investigating.”

“Hang on, what about teacher workload?” I hear you shout. Yet speak to most teachers and they will tell you that the era of the classroom aesthete who spent portions of their holidays beautifying their display boards by covering them in pleated, diaphanous drapes ended some time ago (a tidal wave of curriculum content probably knocked them off the chair they were standing on). Functional and supportive of learning - rather than OTT to the extent of being a negative for CLT - is probably where it’s at on displays for most schools.

So, yes, a good argument is in place for display boards to stick around. Certainly the evidence suggests that the visual benefits of displays (in moderation) in creating a comfortable environment, and in helping to build a sense of classroom “ownership” among pupils, make them worth keeping around for a while longer. Whether you should use a pin or a staple, though? I’m not getting involved in that one.

John Morgan is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 23 October 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on... The display board battle”