A year and a half ago, headteacher Dorothy MacGinty decided to ban mobile phones in her small independent girls’ school in rural Scotland. She is clear about why she had to take action: “The girls were almost addicted to them,” she says. She recalls one particular incident when she went into the sixth-form common room and saw the girls sitting together in groups but not making eye contact. Their attention was focused on their smartphone screens and their thumbs were flying.

“I just thought, ‘This is not easy for them,’ ” MacGinty explains.

But it wasn’t just the way the girls were socialising that worried her: she saw the phones becoming a constant interruption and preoccupation.

“The girls’ attention was constantly focused on their phone. It was either buzzing or pinging in their pocket and they were waiting for that buzz and not focusing on their work or what the teacher was saying.”

Then MacGinty’s own daughter, who at the time was a senior student at her school, Kilgraston School, near Perth, asked - after two weeks of a new regime that involved her leaving her phone at home - if she could bring it into school again because she had no one to speak to.

“I realised then, ‘Wow, this has become a real problem,’ ” says the headteacher.

So, after consulting with staff, parents and students, MacGinty took the decision to ban mobile phones during the school day - as well as restrict the lessons that the girls took their iPads to. And while she was nervous about the move at the time - writing about the decision in Tes Scotland in September 2018, she talked about bracing herself for the reaction - changes for the better quickly followed. More than a year later, she remains convinced that the ban has been for the best.

Outlawing phones during the school day has allowed students to step off the social media merry-go-round, which MacGinty believes has had huge implications for students’ confidence and self-esteem. But the move has also had an impact on attainment, she says. Last year, the school achieved its best exam results for five years - and MacGinty is in no doubt that the phone ban played a significant part in this.

Kilgraston’s experience is worth delving into because something about modern life is making girls unhappy. Because the biggest change in the way adolescents live their lives today relates to the rise of the smartphone and social media, it is thought that this new way of interacting is a factor.

Recent research published by the Scottish government found that throughout primary there was little difference in the proportion of boys and girls suffering “low mood” - around 22 per cent of P5 to P7 children. However, as they progressed through secondary school, girls were increasingly likely to suffer from very high emotional problems. By S4, one in three girls had very high emotional problems, against only one in 10 boys.

In the past decade, various pieces of research in Scotland and the rest of the UK have revealed that, while mental health is a concern across the board, girls in particular appear to be suffering. Last year the government even published a paper entitled Exploring the reported worsening of mental wellbeing among adolescent girls in Scotland.

Potential explanations have been explored by researchers, such as some girls having no family member to speak to or few friends, but this higher rate of emotional problems is not explained by these risk factors.

It has been suggested by researchers that one factor could be social media, which has rapidly increased in popularity and which, they say, girls engage with differently from boys, tending to prefer photo-based platforms where they compare themselves with others.

It is a trend that MacGinty instantly recognises. The positive feedback girls get in the form of “likes” on social media - notably, photo-sharing platform Instagram - are “hugely important to them”, she says, as are the number of virtual “friends” they manage to accumulate. She also points out that girls will often be managing more than one profile - one that they are perhaps happy for their parents to see, and others they keep hidden.

Other teachers also talk about girls having public and private profiles. One is the image they want to project; the other might be more of a warts-and-all version that they let close friends see.

“They care far too much about likes from friends and boys,” says MacGinty. “It seems almost as if their confidence and self-esteem depends upon it.

“When you think about all the things you do as a parent and an educator to build their confidence and make them feel secure and happy in the person that they are … if all of that is dependent upon whether other people like an image you put on Instagram, that’s really quite scary.”

Alex Hems, head of St George’s School for Girls in Edinburgh, points out that there is also an expectation that when they get a message, students will respond instantly. If someone fails to respond to a message they have read, there is a word for it: “patching”, as in, “Are you patching me?”

Hems says: “As an adult you would think they’re probably busy, or thinking of what to say, or on the phone, but as an adolescent it’s much harder to process these things. Even a happy, well-balanced teenager who is very comfortable in themselves can feel undermined if they post a picture of themselves looking special and no one responds. They don’t have the perspective and emotional maturity to handle that.”

St George’s recently tightened up its mobile phone policy: now devices are banned in school unless a teacher gives permission for them to be taken out of bags or pockets. This might be so students can carry out things like a quick Google search relevant to the lesson, or use their phone to take a photograph of some homework that has been set.

An exception is also made for girls in sixth form - S5 and S6 - who can use their phones in their common room, but not in other areas of the school.

“We don’t want to demonise phones,” says Hems. “[Students] need to see they can be a valuable tool both now in terms of how they organise themselves and the way they work, and in the future.”

MacGinty says she has been accused of turning her students into Luddites, but she is unrepentant. She points out that her students know how to work a smartphone - they’ve been doing it since they were 5 - and they also use ICT all the time in school, while every girl has an iPad to support their learning. This is about cutting out the noise that stops them from concentrating during the school day, she says.

“They are so compelled to have this communication - they need someone else to take it away,” says MacGinty. “We wouldn’t give them access to sweets 24/7 but we give them access to social media. The ban lets them see ‘this is not essential to who I am’.”

Her comments echo the explanation given recently by Lisa Kerr, principal of the independent Gordonstoun School in Moray, when defending her school’s decision to ban phones in 2017.

Kerr believes all schools should ban phones in order to “help pupils develop their full potential”. She said: “Just as you wouldn’t leave out bowls of sweets and expect children to eat sensibly, we need to help our students to control technology rather than allowing technology to control them.”

The latest research from the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey of more than 5,000 Scottish adolescents was published last month, revealing that almost half of 15-year-old girls and 40 per cent of 15-year-old boys said they were in touch online with friends and family almost all the time throughout the day.

Interestingly, though, Joanna Inchley, who coordinates the survey in Scotland and specialises in child and adolescent health, says there is no connection between these intense levels of communication and poor mental health.

“That would suggest that time spent online communicating with friends is not necessarily in itself a bad thing,” she says.

But the study revealed negative findings, such as low levels of life satisfaction and higher levels of health complaints, among adolescents who had problematic social media use. These were the young people who did things like lie about the time they spent on social media; who often felt bad when they could not use social media; and who tried to spend less time on social media but failed. Nine per cent of young people in the survey reported their use as problematic.

“The big question seems to be: what’s the tipping point? So, when do you go from frequent to problematic use? And could schools and families intervene before this happens?” says Inchley.

Inchley, though, warns against drawing simple conclusions about social media.

“We have to be careful how much time young people spend online connected because they need to disconnect, relax and have a break,” she says. “24/7 connectivity is not good for anyone but sometimes we have to recognise the benefits it does bring. It is a new way in which they socialise and in which they communicate, and it can result in very supportive and meaningful relationships.

“Often young people are communicating online with people they already communicate with in their day-to-day lives; they are just enhancing those relationships. We know there are risks that have to be managed but risks are not the same as harms - [students] can learn to manage the risks they are exposed to, like cyberbullying.”

HBSC also records a decline in girls’ mental health, and sleep is another issue that Inchley believes is concerning and could help to explain the rise in mental health issues - as well as the pressure girls feel under at school.

A third of girls and a quarter of boys reported in 2018 that they had difficulties getting to sleep more than once a week. Before 2010, in this longitudinal study, one in four girls reported this and one in five boys did.

Inchley says that although the advice is that mobile phones should be left outside of teenagers’ bedrooms, many report that they still have access to their phones at night - 92 per cent of 15-year-olds had their phone in their room at night; 83 per cent of 13-year-olds; and 71 per cent of 11-year-olds.

The other big issue is schoolwork, she says, which is particularly affecting older girls - 75 per cent of 15-year-old girls said they felt pressured by schoolwork. To address this anxiety, Inchley suggests that schools must create an environment in which mental health is talked about and where students have people who they can go to.

Back at Kilgraston, two senior girls chat to me about the impact of the ban. They say MacGinty’s announcement in 2018 caused “outrage” among their ranks and they worried they would end up with no friends.

But now they say the ban has given them “the headspace” to focus on other things - such as school work, but also friendships in the real world. So, instead of surreptitiously trying to scroll through Instagram under their desks during lessons, they are now far more likely to be paying attention, they say, but also they are more likely to be getting to know their fellow students.

Both the girls I speak to are boarders, but they say that, despite the fact they were living together, they were no more than acquaintances before because maintaining their online relationships took up a lot of their time. Looking back, one of the girls says that keeping up with social media and “how others thought of me” had become an obsession. Girls use social media to boost their confidence, she believes.

“On Instagram, it’s all about how many friends you have and if you are getting enough likes,” she says. “If people identify they are not getting as many likes, they wonder why they are not getting as many. It makes you question your self-worth because you are wondering, ‘Is it my looks? Am I not portraying a good enough life?’ ”

When St George’s introduced a stricter mobile phone policy, Hems noticed an increase in noise in social areas and corridors - not rowdy noise but the hum of girls talking to each other and interacting.

A mobile phone ban sounds like a draconian proposition, but is it really, given the school day ends at 3.30pm? And could the strict policies on mobile use that appear to be emerging in the private sector be giving their students further advantages over their state-school peers? If MacGinty is right that her mobile ban has improved exam results - as well as mental health - then surely the answer to that has to be “yes”.

It is interesting to note that Scotland’s newest state secondary - Bertha Park High in Perth - decided to ban mobile phones from the get-go. Maybe it’s time for other state schools to follow suit.

Emma Seith a reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 28 February 2020 issue under the headline “Hanging on the telephone”