Most parent guidance about screens hands families a rules sheet: time limits, app lists, a contract to sign. It tends to gather dust on the fridge, because rules date the moment a new app arrives and a teenager always knows one the sheet has not heard of. There is a sturdier thing a school can give parents, and it costs nothing to print, because your staff already use it. Three words for what a screen is being used for: passive, interactive, creative.

These are the first half of PICRAT, the framework your teachers may already use to think about technology in lessons. The full model has a second axis about the role the technology plays, which matters in the classroom. For parents, the three words on their own do the job. They describe a child's relationship to whatever is on the screen, and they work as well on a Saturday morning as in a Tuesday lesson.

The three words, in plain terms

For the newsletter or the parent slide

Passive. Taking content in without doing much back: watching clip after clip, scrolling, half-listening. Fine in small amounts, worth noticing when it is most of the time.

Interactive. Responding to something or someone: an educational game, a group chat about homework, a quiz, a debate, playing with friends online.

Creative. Making something that was not there before: an edited video, a piece of digital art, a few lines of code, a piece of writing they publish.

The point of the three words is not to rank them. This is the part to get right, and the part a rushed newsletter usually gets wrong. Passive is not the bad corner and creative is not the gold star. A child watching a documentary closely is in a different place from a child editing a film, and both can be exactly right depending on what the moment is for. The words are a map of what is happening, not a scoreboard a child is meant to climb. A tired teenager watching something undemanding after a hard day is resting, not failing.

What the words give a parent is a better question than "how long have you been on that." They let a parent ask what kind of time it is. Two hours of editing a video and two hours of scrolling read identically on a screen-time dashboard and mean completely different things. The vocabulary is how a parent tells them apart.

Passive, interactive and creative as three equal cards Three cards of equal size, labelled Passive, Interactive and Creative, each with a plain definition. They are shown as equal placements rather than a ladder, under the prompt "What kind of time is it?". What kind of time is it? P Passive Taking it in. Watching, scrolling, listening. I Interactive Responding. Games, chats, quizzes, debate. C Creative Making something. Video, art, code, writing. Equal weight. A map of the time, not a ladder to climb.
The same three words work in a lesson and at the kitchen table. None is the good corner; each is right for a different moment.

Why a shared language beats a rules sheet

Here is the argument to make to your staff and your parents both. A child who hears the same three words at school and at home is being taught one consistent way to think about their own screen use, instead of two competing ones. The teacher who asks "what did you make today" and the parent who asks the same question over dinner are reinforcing each other. The child starts to narrate their own time in those terms, which is the goal: a young person who can say "that was just passive, I should do something else now" has internalised the judgement, which no time limit can teach.

A rules sheet tells a child what they may not do. A shared vocabulary teaches them to read what they are doing. Only one of those still works when the next app arrives.

It also survives change. New platforms appear constantly, and any list of named apps is out of date within a year. Passive, interactive and creative do not date, because they describe the child's behaviour rather than the product. Whatever the app of the month turns out to be, it is one of those three things, and a parent armed with the words can place it without needing to understand the app at all.

How to roll it out

Keep it light. The three words fit on a single slide for a parents' evening, a short paragraph in a newsletter, a line at the bottom of a homework email. Model the question you want parents to ask: "ask your child what they made or did, rather than only what they watched." If your staff already use PICRAT, point that out to parents, because the fact that the school and home are using the same language is most of the value. Send the words home, use them yourself, and let them do the work over a term rather than in a single assembly.

Andy Perryer is the head of digital learning at a group of international schools and the creator of PICRAT Suite. The passive, interactive and creative axis comes from the PICRAT framework developed by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West in their 2020 paper.