How noisy is your classroom? Are there often several conversations going on at once? Or is it silent when students are working? More importantly, does it matter?

According to Sam Wass, a professor of early years at the University of East London’s Baby Development Lab, it really does.

Last year he published a study showing that a noisy home environment can be detrimental to the attention span of one-year-olds. And now he’s moving his research into the classroom, exploring the impact that noise has on teaching and learning in the early years.

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Here, he talks to Tes about the research around noise and the implications for classroom practice.

The impact of classroom noise on learning

Tes: Why is it important to consider noise levels in schools?

Sam Wass: When interacting with children, it’s very easy to assume that their experience of the world is similar to ours. But actually, there’s a massive amount of research that suggests that this isn’t the case. 

One of the most important examples of this is around noise. As an adult, when you’re in a restaurant, a pub or a busy office, there are often 30 different conversations going on around you. However, your brain automatically shuts out the distracting information and tunes into the conversation you’re directly having. You’re not aware you’re doing this but studies show that we’re very efficient at filtering out these background noises.

However, there is a lot of behavioural and neuroscience evidence that suggests that children’s brains find this much harder to do. If they’re in a situation where there are five people talking at once, they find it much harder to focus on the speech stream coming from the one person they’re talking to, and to block out the others. This occurs throughout childhood and even into the teenage years.  

This is really important because children spend their lives in environments where there are lots of people talking at once: schools, naturally, are noisy places. 

Is there any research to show the impact that this noise has on learning?

Yes, there is, and it’s best broken down into two categories: auditory and visual noise.

A good example of auditory noise is the one explained above but visual noise is all about field of view. If, for example, I’m trying to engage in a task with my teacher but as well as seeing her, I can also see lots of brightly coloured things on the walls and a lot of people moving around, this is visual noise: it distracts me from focusing on the task. 

Research published in 2014 by Anna Fisher, of Penn State University, compared children’s learning in two classroom environments: one that had brightly coloured charts, resources and art all over the walls, and one that had bare walls. She found that learning overall was better in the latter. 

Later, she built on this research, looking at whether or not resources on the wall became less distracting over time. She found that they did, but not as much for children as they did for adults: children are still likely to be distracted by bright or moving things in their field of view, even if they see them every day.

You conducted research looking at the effect of noise in the home environment on children’s development. What did it show?  

We knew from other research that children whose early home environment is noisy tend to have slower language development than others, but we also wanted to see if these children pay attention differently. 

To do this, we looked at the brain’s stress system: everyone has one, and it allows us to accommodate change.  

Our research found that when children grow up in noisy and rapidly changing environments, it affects the development of their stress system. This, in turn, affects their ability to pay attention.

How did you find that out?

We put little wearable microphones, cameras and physiological stress monitors on children who experienced differing levels of noise exposure in the home environment. 

We showed them a series of static, interesting pictures, and those growing up in noisy environments struggled to pay attention to them. This is because they are used to having to constantly flit and react to different things; their stress systems aren’t set up to allow them to pay attention to just one thing at a time. 

Noise can make children more unstable, which affects their attention span and, in turn, their ability to learn.   

You’re conducting new research looking specifically at the impact of noise in schools. How will this work?

We’re working with Newham Learning, a group of 40 primary schools in Newham, and we’re putting the same microphones, cameras and physiological stress monitors on Reception children. This equipment will monitor children’s physiological stress, concentration, pro-social behaviours and learning when they are in an indoor versus an outdoor environment.  

There’s a lot of research that shows that children’s psychological stress is lower and their sustained emotional attention is better in outdoor settings, but we don’t really know why that is. It might be because the outdoors is quieter, so that’s what we want to test.  

To do this, children are being taught similar lessons both outdoors and indoors while wearing the equipment, so we can see which is the more conducive learning environment. 

Surely some outdoor settings can be noisier than others, though. Might that affect the results?

In classrooms, where there are lots of people talking at once, the noise bounces off the walls and comes back at you. In an outdoor setting, however, it disappears into the sky.  

Some playgrounds are, of course, noisier than others, and we’ve got a variety of schools with different types of outdoor settings. If we do find that noise affects learning, it might be that outdoor environments that are noisy aren’t much better than indoor settings.

Does what we know about the effects of noise mean that schools will need to make changes to their environments?

I think the growing body of research around noise will lead to big changes in schools. We need to be thinking really hard, and quite urgently, about how we can minimise auditory and visual noise. 

This isn’t going to be easy: at the moment, schools aren’t designed with noise in mind. There are often a lot of hard surfaces for ease of cleanliness, but these make it difficult for children to pay attention because noise bounces off the surfaces. 

We know that smaller rooms, with less noise, are better for children, but in EYFS, particularly, there are also practicalities that can make this tricky. You need to keep your staff-to-student ratio the same at all times, so you tend to have large rooms.

It’s the same for a lunch hall, for example: when you walk into a canteen and there are 200 children all chatting away, the noise is deafening. It’s hard for an adult brain to process thoughts in that environment, let alone a child’s. However, when you’ve got hundreds of students who all need to eat lunch at a similar time, and only one school hall, you haven’t got a choice.  

But the research is clear, and I think that in 50 to 100 years’ time, schools will look very different. 

Practically, how can schools begin to make these changes, without waiting 50 years for a redesign?

In some early years settings, bookshelves are used to divide up rooms and make different learning spaces. These bookshelves are about a metre tall, so children can’t see over them, and each space has just the resources needed for that lesson. One space, for example, may be for phonics, and while children are in it, they can’t be distracted by maths resources, or science, because they simply can’t see them. Other solutions may be around noise dampening materials that can hang from ceilings, but these do tend to be expensive. 

I recognise that these solutions will be out of reach for many schools, and that’s why we need to campaign for change. We need adjustments for noise to become part of the assessment criteria from Ofsted: budgets will have to be increased then. 

If we can campaign for these changes, and move away from really noisy environments to much more quiet and focused ones, there would be a big impact on learning.

Sam Wass is one of the speakers at the 2022 World Education Summit. Tes is the official media partner for the event. For more information or to book tickets, visit worldedsummit.com.