Group of 17 London secondary schools join up to go smartphone-free

I think many of the comments in opposition to this are coming from people that do not have children. Many of those in support do. I speak as a parent of a child, and I think “parent brain” will affect your thoughts on this. Having said that, I grew up on dial up and very low tech HTML. Not social media which is an entirely different beast.<p>There is a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. NYU Prof. Jonathan Haidt argues that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting have led to a &quot;rewiring&quot; of childhood and a rise in mental illness. Suicides for both teenage girls and boys are up.<p>I’m choosing to send my kids to a school whose parents have also agreed to remove or drastically curb the use of social media. Not eliminate the creative sense of electronic tinkering.

We have schools doing this in the Netherlands. Students actually report liking it because they are now more in real physical contact with their fellow students directly instead of immersed in their phone every chance they get.<p>I think that shows that indeed it should be a rule, voluntary will not work because of something akin to the network effect.<p>When we get interns at our company many of them, instead of communicating with us are in their phones during lunch and coffee breaks. It’s a disease, they don’t integrate, they don’t learn being social around collegeas. I don’t like most people of that generation and they never get to know me. Something has to change.

My son (15 in London) has moved schools more than I&#x27;d like and they&#x27;ve all had smartphone policies that ranged from &quot;must be in your bag&quot;, via &quot;must be in your locker&quot;, to &quot;must be left at home&quot;. None have allowed phones to be out during school hours, or on school grounds, other than in very limited circumstances, generally with prior permission, so I&#x27;m more surprised that so many schools, apparently all in Southwark, were this lenient to start with.<p>The one school my son went to that had a &quot;must be left at home&quot; policy, I think went slightly too far (many students there had a complex travel route, and parents wanted to be able to check in if e.g. they were running late), but at the other ones having them lock it in a locker or hand it in at the door didn&#x27;t see to be an issue for either the students or parents, nor did many students seem to want to risk detention for taking their phone out of the bag without good reason at the school were that was policy.

What was the impetus for schools to become &quot;smartphone-friendly&quot;? In the 00s, phones&#x2F;smartphones in class weren&#x27;t a thing.

From TFA:<p>&gt; The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.<p>In my experience as a parent, this is nothing new. Until last year one of my children went to a very large secondary school in the UK (not in London though). The above was the rule for all of the seven years they were at the school: if you kept your phone out of sight and set to dnd then you were ok, but if it was visible then it was confiscated. My impression as a parent is that it was reasonably well observed by students and enforced by staff.<p>Context: We have an election here in the UK in ~2 weeks and phones in schools have been a minor moral panic issue that some of the parties are trying to use to assert their education credentials. I&#x27;m not saying there is no problem with children and phones - I believe there is - but theres a reason its getting attention at the moment.

I was curious about the legal grounds that schools have to confiscate student&#x27;s phones for up to a week, and I found this document from the UK government:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;media&#x2F;62d1643e8fa8f50bfbefa55c&#x2F;Searching__Screening_and_Confiscation_guidance_July_2022.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;media&#x2F;62d1643e8fa8f...</a><p>Some things that concern me:<p>- Page 19: Staff may examine any data or files on an electronic device they have confiscated as a result of a search, as defined in paragraph 57, if there is good reason to do so.<p>- Page 20: In determining whether there is a ‘good reason’ to examine the data or files, the member of staff should reasonably suspect that the data or file on the device has been, or could be used, to cause harm, undermine the safe environment of the school and disrupt teaching, or be used to commit an offence.<p>It also doesn&#x27;t seem to lay out a limit on the duration for which a device can be confiscated - which makes confiscation for a week look a bit like a grey area to me. Would love to hear from anyone with more experience on this area.

I believe that, in retrospect, these schoolchildren will greatly appreciate this decision.

Denver School(s) of Science and Technology (DSST) have been mobile free for a long time. The kids, I am told, love it. These are public schools. Confiscated phones are required to be picked up in person by the guardian. Something that can be quite the trek and traffic fight. I am told repeat offenses are not common.<p>Denver&#x27;s public school system (DPS) is a bit unique, just FYI. All public schools are chartered, including the DSSTs. Meaning that all guardians are <i>required</i> to select the school that they want their kids to go to, there are no defaults. All kids get free bus passes on municipal transport. As is usual in Colorado public schooling, things get really law-y as the city and school district lines cross over county lines (cities are not entirely within counties in CO).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dsstpublicschools.org&#x2F;dsst-cgms-family-handbook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dsstpublicschools.org&#x2F;dsst-cgms-family-handbook</a>

My kids&#x27; school district with 10k students has a no phones policy. Kids have to check them at the door, if they bring them.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;berkeleyhighjacket.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;news&#x2F;bhs-teachers-unify-against-the-use-of-phones-within-classrooms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;berkeleyhighjacket.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;news&#x2F;bhs-teachers-unify-...</a>

Source: I am a parent of child who has just finished GCSEs. We live in the London commuter belt.<p>The hope that stopping phones in school will help the mental health issues that children are facing today is a ridiculous hallucination. The second paragraph of the article states <i>&quot;in the hope of also addressing the downsides of their use outside the school gates&quot;</i>. Hoping for a better result is not enough.<p>Phones enable a level of socialisation, both positive and negative, on a scale that people who finished school as recently as five years ago will not understand. My child is a product of the covid-taught secondary schoolers and has very complex relationships with communication technology.<p>It is not about the phones in school. It is about games, apps, social media, media, influencing, content creation, filters, pr0n, spam, bots, AI, news. Those same platforms and tools are used to bully, shame, abuse, and stalk. Whatsapp &#x27;in&#x27; groups allow social inclusion and exclusion at a pace that would never have happened at the same rate as before. You can be in and out of a group in seconds. You can feel the pressure to have to &#x27;engage&#x27; at 2am. The phones <i>are the problem</i>, but switching them off while at school will make no difference.<p>By all means, let those schools trial it and give us the data. Adjust the results levels of family income, ethnic background, previous mental-health issues. I doubt we will see a drop in cases of teenage depression, self-harm, and suicide.<p>The UK (and many other education systems) have a pattern of &#x27;parental blame&#x27;. For many educators, if a child kicks off at school it is not because they are being bullied, but because their parents expose them to domestic violence. &#x27;Phones off at school&#x27; makes all the phone-related problems the parents&#x27; fault. Forgetting, of course, that the phone is just a device that connects children to their school peers.

The Netherlands already banned smartphones from schools since January 1st 2024<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iamexpat.nl&#x2F;education&#x2F;education-news&#x2F;netherlands-ban-mobile-phones-school-classrooms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iamexpat.nl&#x2F;education&#x2F;education-news&#x2F;netherlands...</a>

I know it would complicate things a lot, but are we sure it&#x27;s smartphones and not social media &#x2F; &quot;not educational&quot; websites being the issue?<p>If I had a phone with calendar and a to do list, when at school, I might have fared better.

Vaguely related: A local theater is making sort of a big deal about sealing phones and smart watches into Yondr pouches for the performance unless you go to an area where phones are allowed. I don&#x27;t really care but this seems to be a solution to a problem I really haven&#x27;t observed when attending local theater.

We are limiting TV time to 30m per day and no pad&#x2F;phone for our 4 year old kid.<p>IMO the issue is with the school, not us. Schools will inadvertently introduce pad as a learning device, and his friends will use such devices too. I hope they ban it in Canadian schools too.

Can the students use other computing devices like Chromebooks or iPads with restrictions in place? Overall, this is likely a success for the schools who can commit and the students willing to compromise.

We peaked at flip phones. I remember learning to type on a typewriter. It was really fun. I loved the internals.<p>Kids are missing out on the fun stuff and replacing it with phones. i hope we start to see change.

I was a student of one of these so called smartphone free schools and I used my smartphone during class time. Just because it was banned. So I highly doubt this&#x27;ll work.

I am suprised they allowed them at first to begin with.

Listening to something on the BBC the other day that I found thought provoking.<p>The speaker suggested that the question’at what age do you give your child access to the internet’ could better be framed ‘at what age do you want to give internet companies access to your child’

Sounds like commonsense to me. This was the policy when I went to school too - use a phone during school time and it&#x27;s confiscated.

Overblown hysteria both makes school administrators feel useful and sells papers...

What does this need to be a collective action?<p>Why can&#x27;t a school decide on their own?

This is great! The UK is showing great leadership in this.

This is plainly idiotic. Smartphones are great for having useful apps for studying such as dictionaries and translators, they provide access to Wikipedia and means to communicate with other kids. They also make parents feel less stressful knowing they can always call or message their kids. Whoever came up with this idea is a retrograde.

My schooling experience (in London, less than 10 years ago) was a waste of time. If they want students to be engaged, make the material engaging.

Of course, staff are not subject to this, because while evidently a deadly poison to the 16 year old brain, they become an essential professional tool as soon as you acquire your teaching loicense.

The cool &#x2F; mischevious kids will still bring phones to school, while life of the calm kids will be made miserable.<p>Story old as time.<p>Fascinating that people here cant predict it.

Confiscating phones from children for an entire week is an unhinged idea. Confiscating for the rest of the school day I can understand, but not giving them the phone back when they go home is dangerous.<p>At some point a child will get abducted on their way home from school, or be unable to contact emergency services, because the school confiscated their phone.<p>They seem to want parents to buy dumb phones instead for their children. Can you imagine trying to text “I’m being followed by someone on XYZ road” on a Nokia-style keyboard? Do dumb phones support sending GPS coordinates to emergency services like smartphones do?<p>Even mundane things like what if a child’s train gets cancelled and they need to check Google Maps to find an alternative way home.