Most schools already ban mobile phones during lessons and usually during the school day, too.
As such, the government’s non-statutory guidance calling on schools to ban phone use means little will change for many.
However, the announcement is important to help get all of us in education thinking about the impact of phones on our young people, the issues they are creating and what needs to be done.
Mobile phones in schools
Mobile phones were, of course, something that most young people already used before the pandemic. But two years of isolation and lockdowns meant they became all-consuming as a means to browse apps and communicate with their peers, at all times.
Now, while schools are back to normal, phone use often remains the preferred way in which young people communicate and occupy their time.
Indeed, in schools where phone use is allowed at breaktime or lunch, it is not uncommon to see pupils rushing to get back on their devices to see what they have missed and start communicating with one another through apps, rather than face to face.
This is no small issue. Humans gain social skills through face-to-face communication, from recognising facial cues to tone of voice, or identifying the underlying meaning in something being said or the emotions being expressed. These are means of communication that aren’t explicitly taught but learned through interactions.
Now, though, with social media companies doing all they can to keep users hooked for as long as possible, our young people are failing to engage with one another as they would have in the past.
The true lasting effects of this are still somewhat unknown.
The effect on educational development
Yet the impact of this on young people’s social skills is something that many teachers will have noticed, and the associated rise in mental health issues, poor behaviour and increased persistent absenteeism will undoubtedly also be linked.
Not only this but also, for most young people, time spent on their phones is time when they are passively consuming content, chiefly videos, rather than reading or speaking, both of which are known to be key to educational and cognitive development.
What’s particularly worrying is that these issues will be more pronounced for those from more deprived backgrounds where parents may be working long hours or don’t have the language skills themselves to help with homework, for example, and so phone use is even more prevalent.
Getting children talking
This is why schools should be banning phones: not just to avoid disruption in lessons and to set behaviour standards but to give young people time away from their devices and the chance to engage with both one another and their teachers in more open, organic and human ways.
That way we might start to see pupils not immediately rush to their phones when they leave schools, but instead continue talking to one another, face to face, as they walk home or sit on the bus together, and start forming natural, happy and lifelong friendships, not reliant on phones.
Of course, though, young people will always need to use their phones. These devices are part of the modern now and so I am not suggesting we can pretend that they won’t use them or access social media sites.
Taking on the tech giants
If the government really wants to make a difference to how phones are used by young people in a way that would benefit their education, it should focus not on simplistic guidance for schools that most follow anyway but on the technology giants that run the apps that young people use so much.
Because it is not really the phones that are the problem; it is the content served to pupils that is the problem, and the fact that social media companies allow it to proliferate unchecked into the eyes, ears and minds of children. This content is constantly being refined to their preferences by invisible algorithms.
Those algorithms then end up rewarding influencers, including morally and ethically corrupt individuals pushing ideas that no young child or young person should be exposed to. But because they generate lots of views, they are rewarded by the algorithms to increasingly appear on unique content streams designed for the user.
The ‘war’ on phones
Banning phones in schools may reduce the time young people can spend viewing this sort of content, but if they can access it the moment they leave then the impact of what schools can do will be limited.
Any true government challenge to what phones are doing to our young people should extend to holding social media companies to account.
It should be about ensuring that we are safeguarding our children from harm, from bullying, from inappropriate trends and behaviours that cause children to descend into viral crazes that lead to criminal damage, self-harm, eating disorders and other mental health crises.
That’s where the focus of the “war” on phones should be.
Sufian Sadiq is director of teaching school at Chiltern Learning Trust
