Fifteen secondary schools in Sutton, south London, are putting VR headsets on anxious teenagers this spring. Phase Space, the company making the headsets, designed them in partnership with a local NHS mental health trust — the NHS is the UK’s National Health Service. The stated goal: calm pupils stressed by exams, ADHD, difficult home lives. I read this and my pattern recognition fired before I finished the second paragraph. Not because the technology is bad. Because I have seen this shape before.
June 2017, a comprehensive in Birmingham. A learning support assistant showed me a room they’d converted for “sensory breaks.” Beanbags, a lava lamp, noise-cancelling headphones on a hook. The school had spent £4,200 on the fit-out. The corridor outside that room had strip fluorescents running at 50Hz, a timetable bell at 85 decibels every forty-three minutes, and thirty-two pupils moving between classes in a passage 1.8 metres wide. I asked whether anyone had costed replacing the fluorescents with broad-spectrum LEDs. The assistant looked at me as if I’d asked whether they’d considered demolishing the building.
January 2024, a primary school in Rotterdam. Architect Ector Hoogstad redesigned an entire wing. Wider corridors, acoustic ceiling tiles that drop ambient noise below 40dB, dimmable lighting panels, a timetable with staggered transitions so no corridor carries more than fifteen children at once. The headteacher, Marieke de Vries, told a Dutch radio interviewer that referrals to the school psychologist dropped by a third within one academic year. No headsets. No escape pods. They changed the room instead of changing the child.
I am not making the argument. The two schools are making it for me.
Here is what I know from inside ADHD: my attention does not malfunction. It responds to signal strength. A flickering fluorescent tube is a signal. A ticking clock is a signal. Twenty-eight bodies shifting in chairs, each one producing a micro-sound my nervous system catalogues without my permission. That is a signal. The system is not broken. The system is receiving too much data from a badly designed environment. The appropriate engineering response is to reduce noise at the source. Not to hand the receiver a blindfold.
VR as stress relief operates on the same logic as prescribing painkillers for a repetitive strain injury. The workstation remains badly designed in both cases. Nobody disputes that painkillers reduce pain. The question is why the workstation stays unchanged.
Phase Space’s promotional materials describe “immersive calm environments” — forests, beaches, breathing exercises mapped onto visual landscapes. Turn this over. What they are saying, without saying it, is that the school environment is so hostile to certain nervous systems that the best intervention they can imagine is removing the child from it entirely while the child remains physically seated in it. The body stays in the bad room. The mind leaves. This is not treatment. This is dissociation with better production values.
Amelia Grimshaw, a disability writer, describes the gap between what her body needs and what schools offer as accommodation — aids placed around the edges of a structure nobody questions. The structure remains intact. The aids multiply.
Rolf Fehlbaum, the former chairman of Vitra, a furniture company, once said in a 2013 interview that “the cheapest thing to do is always to add something to an existing building, and the most expensive thing is to admit the building was wrong.” He was talking about office design. He could have been talking about every school corridor I have ever walked through with my entire body braced against input.
You might say: but the VR works. The children feel calmer. I believe it. Calmer after the headset comes off, in the same room, under the same lights, with the same timetable. The relief is real. The cause remains untouched. The product sells precisely because it leaves the environment intact. Nobody has to fight the facilities manager, the budget cycle, the building regulations. You just buy the headsets.
I spent fourteen years in classrooms. I remember every one. Not the lessons — the sensory texture. The particular vibration of a projector fan. The smell of whiteboard markers building over three hours. The moment at 2:15pm when the heating system clicked on and added a low hum that sat exactly at the frequency where my focus collapsed. I did not need an escape pod. I needed someone to turn off the fan, open a window, and believe me when I said the room was wrong.
The Rotterdam school costs more upfront. The VR headsets cost less. The headsets require the children to keep needing them. The redesigned corridor does not. One is a subscription model. The other is infrastructure.
Fifteen schools, each receiving headsets, each leaving the fluorescent tubes exactly where they are.
This article was prompted by London schools trialling VR to relieve pupils’ stress from Guardian Society.