It’s the most pressing question schools face this year. To ban, or not to ban?
I’m talking about the smart phone, of course.
Most schools already have some kind of phone restriction in place - obviously. I hope you didn’t think today’s students are slouched at the back, scrolling TikTok while poor Mr Humphries explains algebra equations on a chalk board. Nearly all have some variant of ‘switch-off-in-class’ or ‘keep-out-of-sight’. But few have outright, total bans. As you’ll see, there’s a big difference.
A fast growing number of schools are taking the hard line. Not in bags. Not switched off in your pocket. Gone. Banished. Zipped up and locked away from entry until final bell. Ideally they’d be left at home entirely, but no parent who’s gotten used to their 24-hour-direct-child-line would agree to that.
Every week there’s a story of some school or other doing exactly that. This month, Ormiston Academies Trust – one of the largest, with 35,000 students across several schools – announced a total ban. There’s new government guidance too, which encourages schools to restrict phone use during the school day. (However, the words guidance and new, when said together, tend to mean nothing will happen for ages). There’s lot of action in the US too. Within a year most schools in Los Angeles and New York will probably be phone-free zones. In many parts of the world, this has been the case for some time. According to UNESCO, Europe is currently the least likely region to have smartphone bans in place.
Over the summer, at the Wilderness festival in Oxfordshire, I interviewed the founder of the smartphone free childhood movement, Clare Fernyhough. Wilderness is one of those festivals where people like the ‘talks’ almost as much as the ‘bands’, which always amazes me. So it’s not exactly representative of the country. But my guess is that 95 per cent of the audience were in favour of a phone ban in schools.
Talking to Clare from Smartphone Free Childhood. In a field in Oxfordshire somewhere
Of all the things I am grateful for when growing up, not having a smart phone in secondary school is near the top. Can you imagine how tough it must be? I remember it mostly as one grand game of social positioning. But at least it partly relented in the evenings and weekends. I admit, therefore, to being entirely bias on this question. My intuition, my hunch, my rose-tinted glasses, all tell me that of course phones should be banned in schools.
That’s part of the problem. Objectivity on the subject is hard. There is, however, a small but growing body of evidence emerging about the effect of school phone bans.
Next week, Sonia Livingstone, a much-respected professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, is publishing a meta-study (a study of studies) about all this. In a recent blog she hinted that the evidence does show smartphone ‘restrictions’ benefit learning. But the evidence is mixed, and it seems to help some groups more than others. (And, she adds, there are surprisingly few decent studies out there).
So it’s not one way traffic. A recent study of 70,000 students in OECD countries found that mobile phone bans in school do help students concentrate better. But – and it’s a biggie – it is also associated with (marginally) lower performance scores. Why? It’s not clear. No-one seems to know.
The thing about the (few) studies is that they don’t always discriminate between different types of phone restrictions. So it’s quite hard to know what exactly is going on. However, a little while back an academic called Sara Abrahamsson examined almost 500 schools in Norway who’d introduced various types of phone restrictions. She found banning phones lowered bullying; reduced psychological problems for students and helped girls’ and poorer students’ grades.
All restrictions were good. But the ones with the strictest bans saw stronger effects than those with weaker bans.
Is this also true in the UK, I wonder? Much as I love Norway, I’m not certain evidence from there would be directly applicable there, what with their annoyingly rich and healthy students.
So I got in touch with a headteacher who’d instituted one of the earliest phone bans back in January 2024, to find out what his experience of this was. Damian McBeath is the head at John Wallis Church of England Academy School, in Ashford, Kent. It’s a very good school, with very good grades.
Headteacher Damian McBeath. A man with a phone plan. (Picture is from the John Wallis website)
Like many schools, John Wallis has had rules about phone use for years: phone off, bottom of the bag. “It was nearly impossible to implement” Damian told me. He was on repeat mode, constantly reminding students about the rule, forever playing whack-a-phone. Kids would use them in the bathrooms at break-time; or disappear during lunch to watch a Netflix programme alone.
One time a group of students filmed and uploaded a Tik-Tok challenge from inside a cubicle.
It gets worse! Any time there was an altercation between teacher and student, those turned off phones at the bottom of bags would suddenly reappear: switched on, filming, uploading. This, explains Damian, was extremely stressful to teachers, who never knew if they’d suddenly appear in a local Facebook group.
Damian thinks that just the presence of a phone in a bag is a distraction. If any student left vibration mode active – and many did – they would be rewarded every few minutes with that little dose of dopamine that accompanies a notification alert. How can learning about tectonic plates compete with an Instagram buzz? Various studies find that it can take grown adults up to 20 minutes to regain full attention after a phone alert.
You can hardly blame the students for this. (Damian doesn’t). They are competing against the smartest minds in Silicon Valley, armed with the world’s most powerful data sets and computers. It’s hardly surprising the phone usually wins.
After one particularly bad incident involving images of a student, Damian went to the governors asking for a total ban: all phones bagged up in a Yondr Pouch, locked and totally inaccessible during school hours. Despite some reservations from a small group of vocal parents worried about their kids being uncontactable, in January 2024, it was agreed.
Yondr pouches. Magnetically sealed, and coming to a school near you.
Damian noticed a difference after just one week. Students seemed calmer, more focused. They were talking more. He was shocked by how quick things seemed to change; like a looming rain cloud had drifted off, and the sun was starting to peek through.
By the end of that term, Damian and his staff looked at the numbers. They couldn’t believe how much had changed.
By July 2024, there was a 40 per cent reduction in sanctions (‘detentions’ in my old-school language) compared to the previous year. So far this school year, it’s down 80 per cent.
Truancy was down 25 per cent too. (One student told Damian he doesn’t bother bunking off lessons anymore because he can’t watch Netflix). Teacher turnover was down from 30 per cent in 2023 to 17 per cent in 2024. That doesn’t surprise me at all. Imagine how hard it is to teach a room full of 15-year-olds. Now add the possibility of being filmed, clipped up, and put online. It’s no wonder teachers are leaving the profession in record numbers.
The number of safeguarding reports – stuff like online bullying – is currently at a five year low. And that number includes things that happen outside the school gates, when the Yondr pouches are opened and the machines handed back. Damian is still trying to work out why that is: “I think it’s because students are talking out their problems and differences in school, face-to-face”.
But it’s more than just the numbers. There’s also the things studies can’t easily capture. Like that pleasant feeling you get after a weekend with barely any screen time. “The culture has totally changed” says Damian. “We see students sitting around and talking, and socialising much more”. There are no digital escape hatches.
Teachers are happier. The parents are happier – even the critics have gone quiet. The only group unsure are the students themselves. If asked, Damian thinks they’d probably ask for their phones back. But I’m not even sure. The Children’s Commissioner for England, Rachel De Souza, recently asked 100 16-21 year olds what they wish their parents had known about social media. The most popular answer was ‘Don’t give us phones too young’.
Maybe this is why it wasn’t that difficult to implement the ban. According to Damian, 98 per cent of the students followed the rule immediately. The rest objected for a few days, but fell in line as soon as they were the weird odd-ones-out. My suspicion is that the students are glad someone is forcing this change on them. Deep down, they prefer it, and know it’s good for them.
It seems inevitable to me that change is coming. One day nearly all schools in the country will have a total ban on all phones. A lot of parents I know are planning to make their school choices based on whether phones are allowed. (There’s probably some guilt mixed in there. Most of us know we haven’t been strict enough ourselves, and we’re looking to the schools for help. Guilt is a powerful motivator.)
The only question is how soon it will happen. I spent 10 years working at the research think-tank, Demos. I noticed that change takes place when public opinion and rigorous evidence collide. Anecdotes, this short essay, Sunday Times articles, or even TV shows presented by Emma Willis doesn’t count as rigorous evidence, sadly.
We’ve reached the public opinion milestone. So what we need now need is a big study on all schools in the UK, like Damian’s, that are instituting total bans. There must be tens or even hundreds of thousands of students going through this right now. Let’s collect everything we can, as quickly as possible, and find out what’s going on. Because if Damian is right, doing nothing is damaging a generation of school kids.
I understand that students need to learn how to use devices well; and that their future personal, social and professional life will depend on it. But are schools the right place to learn this? I doubt it. Anyway, the primary function of digital technology is to dramatically extend human freedom and capability. What we really need is an even greater emphasis on quite old fashioned subjects of morality, responsibility, epistemology. Things that are probably best taught offline anyway.
Gen Z – the poor souls – were the Guinea pigs for mass phone adoption. They know it, too. I think a lot of them are resentful. This next wave will be Guinea pigs for the opposite: the first generation who had phones taken back off them. And one day they’ll thank us for it.