As a trustee of the national charity BackCare, I lead on campaigns to improve children’s physical wellbeing at school.
I first wrote this article for Century 21 Schools

Sometimes the most amazing thoughts strike in the strangest of places. Archimedes had his Eureka moment in the bath. Newton had his sitting under an apple tree. Now I'm having one. I'm sat in an airplane somewhere over the Gobi desert and all I can think of is how, from a child's perspective, schools and airplanes are much the same.

Think about it. I arrived at a time decided by others rather than me. I had a list of prohibited articles that I could not take through the security cordon (the school gates). I ate at the same time as everyone else. I took my place at a pre-assigned seat where, unable to escape, I concentrated mostly on the sense of discomfort that the seat was giving me. Airplane seats seem to be designed solely around squeezing people in and keeping prices low. I find myself thinking that this is also true of the furniture we choose for schools.

The early Victorians, who invented our approach to schools, didn’t have petroleum based plastic, extruded metals, injection mouldings and production lines. Indeed, when they began to expand access to education, they were still an agrarian society. Children were given time off at Easter and

Summer to help with planting and harvesting. Freed from the constraints of mass manufacture, unit profits and re-sale, their furniture was optimised around factors like utility, comfort, lifespan and waste-reduction. It was a sustainable approach and it was also, in terms of ergonomics, much more advanced than our own.

There is no animal on Earth that chooses to sit with a straight back, a right-angled bend at the hips and a right-angled bend at the knee. The only reason why we do it is because it makes it cheaper to produce and transport furniture. Indeed, while children are on average four inches taller than they were fifty years ago, furniture is on average eight inches shorter. The reasons have nothing to do with ergonomics.

Desks show similar levels of forethought. The sloping desks used at that time allowed everyone to find a natural height at which to rest their elbows. They also reduced strain on the back by enabling a much more upright reading position. Try reading anything that is sitting on a horizontal surface. The only way to do it is to tip the head forward of the body, imposing a heavy weight on the upper vertebrae. This imposes a similar physical strain to trying to hold a bag of potatoes six inches forward of the body while trying to learn something.

Today, our children sit on seats designed for short-term use and optimised around the needs of the buyer. Bursars are attracted to plastic seats because they are cheap to buy and light enough to put on top of tables at the end of the day, thus reducing cleaning costs

Outside of schools, the plastic seats that we force our children to use are mostly seen in places like village halls and waiting rooms. They are typically used once a week for up to an hour, supporting community activities like book-clubs, scout meetings and the Women’s Institute. Between uses, they are stacked up in a corner, or arranged around the room so that people can use the space in the m It was for these reasons that the Robin Day plastic chair has come to be seen as a design classic. However, when it is put into schools, its many attributes become massive failings. Between the age of five and sixteen, children will spend around 12,000 hours sat on a chair intended for short term occasional use. Sitting on these chairs is inherently distressing, such that anyone spending more than 20 minutes on one will be hard pressed to remain focused on anything other than their bottom. As the body struggles to remain balanced, pressure on the lower back leads to slouching. This in turn compresses the lungs, making it harder to draw in sufficient oxygen to concentrate (this is made