Dragonskolan school in Sweden’s far north attempts to raise children’s performance through use of intense electric lights

The glass door of classroom C151 at Dragonskolan, an upper-secondary school in Umeå in Sweden’s far north, emits an eerie metallic glow. “When you look inside it seems weird, there’s a strange sterile light – as if it’s some sort of an experiment,” says Sara Culligan, 18.

Culligan and her classmates are willing guinea pigs in an attempt to see whether intense, “full spectrum” electric light can ease the pain of a long, dark Nordic winter.

The students are also part of a bigger debate about the value of light in schools and offices to relieve the jet lag-like symptoms that can arise when hormones are disturbed by long nights and short, dismal days. Some also believe bright light can help treat depression, such as the seasonal affective disorder that some suffer from when daylight disappears.

Many Swedes in this part of the country attest to the difficulty of getting up in the morning when it won’t be light for several more hours. “I feel like a zombie,” says Culligan. Umeå is on the same latitude as Reykjavik, and January is a grim month when the sun sets before 3pm.

“I fall asleep on the bus to school,” says Douglas Nilsson, 18. But since the school last month installed 140 full spectrum lamps into several classrooms, stepping into 64B in the morning is like having a cup of coffee: “It feels like I am waking up,” he says.

Henrik Anrell, 18, finds himself glancing out of the window from time to time to see if the sun is out. “The new lights in the classroom fool you into thinking it’s a sunny day,” he says. “I think that shows it’s actually working.”

The school, which has 2,000 students aged 16 and upwards, is something of a pioneer in using this simple technique to try to boost performance. Light tells the brain to halt production of melatonin – the hormone that makes you sleepy. In the morning, it stimulates the circadian system, resetting your biological clock. Without that stimulus the body delays by a few minutes every day the signal that it’s time to wake up.

“If you accumulate that delay over the winter you become out of sync, like jet lag basically,” says Dr Mariana Figueiro, of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in New York. “So it’s very important to get that signal in the morning to reset your biological clock.”

Exposure to light of the correct wavelength and intensity, for a sufficient period, therefore helps the body to expect to switch off in the evening, so you sleep more and feel better.

There is also a simple psychological effect, Figueiro says – sitting in a brightly lit room can act like a dose of caffeine, helping to cope with a post-lunch dip, for example. She is currently working with Sweden’s Energy Agency to develop a “healthy home” that regulates light for each individual through a mobile phone app that calculates the needs of the circadian system throughout the day.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the theory, there is scant research on the effects of light in schools and offices, and schools in particular are reluctant to change their lighting systems.

When Arne Lowden, a sleep researcher at Stockholm University’s Stress Research Institute, told a conference of 600 school caretakers about the benefits of installing full spectrum lights, they objected that pupils would become hyperactive.

“Schools prefer a home-like, cosy atmosphere, the kind of light we have in the evenings,” he says.

Money is also a concern – schools don’t have the budget for anything but the cheapest option, Lowden says.

Lowden has just completed a study of 18,000 workers in which he found groups with lower exposure to daylight scored higher for bad health, low energy and more sleep problems. “It’s the same in schools. Normally kids have no problems with sleep in summer, but this rises to 30% in winter,” he says.

Light was once a vital consideration in school design, according to Thorbjörn Laike, a professor of environmental psychology at Lund University. Books were written in the UK in the late 19th century on the importance of daylight in the classroom.

“With the advent of artificial light we have forgotten about this knowledge, we felt that we don’t have to bother with it any more,” he says.

Laike conducted a study in a school in Bromley, south-east London, in 2010 which showed a marked improvement in performance when light levels were raised. He recalls an experiment in Sweden in the late 1980s that actually put children in classrooms without windows for several weeks; again this showed “very clear results”, where the children without daylight experienced hormone disruption, behavioural differences and higher sickness absence.

In the US, much work is being done on increasing the amount of daylight in schools, Figueiro says. She and her co-researchers gave pupils goggles that cut out the blue part of the spectrum from waking until mid-afternoon, and found melatonin production was delayed by half an hour within just a few days.

But few schools have experimented with changing the electric lighting, she says: “There is lot of caution, people are reluctant to make changes without more research.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Aurora light room

In Sweden’s far north at this time of year, there is a basic craving for light. At the university, Moa Lundholm, 23, has just finished a 20-minute chillout session in the Aurora light room where students dressed in long white robes sit on white chairs in a white-walled room bathed in intense, full spectrum light.

“It is dark when you go to school and dark when you leave it, and I was feeling a lot sleepier and had less energy to study,” she says. But sitting in the Aurora felt refreshing. “This is a substitute for going out for a walk outside in the sunshine, that’s how it made me feel. It’s a cheap alternative to a spa.”

At Dragonskolan, the moment the lightbulb lit up for headteacher Stellan Andersson was when the municipal energy company offered to give the school some hi-tech lighting. He looked into the research and found some studies that said the effect was just a placebo, but none said that light could cause any harm. So he had nothing to lose.

He hopes for some reduced sickness absence, and perhaps also better academic performance. But the main thing is the students and teachers enjoy the bright new teaching environment.

“It might not make any difference, but then again it might,” he says. “So why not give it a shot?”

Seasonal affective disorder (Sad)

Medical opinion in Sweden has swung against the use of light therapy to treat depressive disorders. Like many, Umeå’s general hospital used to have a light therapy clinic, but this closed because there was no scientific proof that the practice did any good.

Several years ago the Swedish Council on Technology Assessment, or SBU, conducted a systematic review of the research and concluded there was no evidence that the treatment worked. The conclusion is supported by Britain’s NHS, which says there is no strong evidence to support the practice for treating depressive disorders, although it may have a short-term effect.

“There is a lot of medical prejudice against light therapy in Sweden. Doctors say it is too simple; they think it’s like homeopathy or alternative therapy,” says Cecilia Rastad, a physiotherapist in Falun, central Sweden.

For a decade she ran a light therapy clinic every winter at a psychiatric clinic in the town, treating people with daily sessions lasting one or two hours, when patients were bathed in bright, full-spectrum light. But the clinic closed in 2008.

“The medical authorities say the scientific evidence is not enough,” she says. “It may very good for treating depressive symptoms, but we don’t know – so this is steering the medical system towards more pills instead of other treatments.”

But in Skåne, southern Sweden, light therapy lives on.

“The most important thing is the patients’ own experiences,” said Baba Pendse, chief physician at adult psychiatry at Skåne university hospital in Malmö. “Both we and relatives notice that they look happy and are more nimble and alert. Biological tests are so expensive and are not a priority.”