No phone for secondary school

My son is on a closed loop system for his type 1 management (increasingly common) and as such, his phone is an essential part of his medical kit. Hell will freeze over before his school bans him from having his phone.

The irony is , if your child has access to any internet device they have access to all the things you are worried about. It might be limited, it might take some work to work around but it does happen. A few parents will go through the trouble of having no internet access, or having strict controls on the devices, but the vast majority don't because it's not a smartphone and because it takes work and knowledge . It's just a kids' tablet, oh it's the family laptop. It gives a false sense of security.

I can't tell you how many parents swear blind their kid can't have done x,y,z because they don't "even have a smartphone ". Except they did do it and they got access despite the lack of one.

The sooner there’s a complete ban on smartphones in senior schools, the better IMO.

There's never going to be a complete ban, though, is there? Because there will always have to be exceptions made for example for those who use their phone as a medical device and as part of care for ongoing chronic conditions. Then you're going to get the odd parent or child (there's always one) who says 'it's not fair' and kicks off with reasons why their child should also be an exception. And so it goes.

I was almost knocked over by a girl surgically attached to her phone and its screen but she screamed at me Look where you're going you old bat!

Yes because that’s where the apps are. The questions are literally on the app and they get marked by the app.
a lot of the apps are multiple choice and the kids learn routes around them

Are kids literally doing homework on a phone? Isn’t that terrible for their eyes? And difficult to type etc?

What other parents do is relevant, because of the being left out problem.

The poll on this thread is showing about 50:50 for and against. That’s great - if the 50% against smartphones aged 11 hold off giving smartphones until their kids are 14-16, there’s no problem with being left out.

If the 50% against hold off, schools will also be forced to not rely on them.

For the OP, I’d wait and see what happens. My Y7 DD doesn’t have a smartphone. She doesn’t need one for the bus or for school lunches. They are not allowed to be seen at school and this is strictly enforced. She accesses homework on a desktop at home and texts her friends on a brick phone! I imagine we will get her one in the next few years but we’re hoping to hold off until year 9.

I think most children inherit their phone when an adult upgrades.

I wouldn't ban them outright and depending on the school I might tolerate some usee.

Eg to photograph the white board with home work on it.

Or the day I covered a photography class in a room with no equipment, and to be fair the students were very sensible. They took black and white portraits of each other.

There are also quizzes and educational

The kids school policy is phones are not to be used during school hours. Although we have some allowable provision in their pupil profiles because of their additional needs.
I have one in year 7 (daughter) and one in year 10 (son). They both walk home from school and have had a lot of issues with bullying so the Google Family Link works well to see where they are.

This involves the youngest being allowed to use hers to call or text me if she is struggling, a quick call usually means she can be in all her lessons. She also uses hers to listen to audiobooks or music or use one of her art apps during her lunch break because it helps her cope with the afternoon. She also has permission to have lunch with her brother because of bullying. She currently hasn't been given provision for a laptop although she had one at primary school.

Her brother has a laptop for lessons but he uses his phone for speech to type to take notes because he is dyslexic and he can't type well enough to take notes that he can read afterwards. He sometimes needs the phone for coloured filters and magnifier apps for printed materials it works better for him than the products the school can purchase to do the same thing because that way he has access at home and at school. We also have a agreement with some of the teachers to share their PowerPoints and teaching materials after the lesson and I help him type up a summary in a large size font with double spacing. Before he had the laptop we had an agreement that he could use a Kindle to read books and text because he could change the size and font easily. He also had something to make mind maps for more visual learning that doesn't work on his laptop but could be used on his phone.

At the kids school parent contact and payments is through My Child At School it also has a copy of their timetables on it. But they mostly prefer to use Google calendar for that and Google Tasks to add reminders. Homework is set via Google Classroom, all contact between pupils and teachers is via their school Gmail accounts. They use a mix of Google Documents, Google Sheets and Google Slides for homework and Google Drive for storage with occasional use of Abode Reader for pdf files.

They both have Maths homework through the same app called SparkX I think. They both have Science homework through Educake. They are both supposed to do Grammer and Spelling stuff daily through Bedrock. He has English homework through one app and hers is through something different. She has languages homework through two different apps. BBC bitesize is recommended for revision and review and his teacher sends them links to History videos on a YouTube channel because they did a better job of breaking down the topics than the textbook.

Outside of school, they don't care one little bit about social media they use WhatsApp for talking to their friends and they compete with each other on Duolingo. He is obsessed by Spotify and she likes making stuff on Canva. The most used apps other than that are Audible, Smart Audiobook Player and Libby for reading, Pinterest and Mistplay for time wasting, Stocard to access my loyalty cards in shops if I am not with them and their bus apps for travel.

So they have lots of reasons to have phones in secondary school because its easier than anything else.

Absolutely right

DS is going up to secondary in September and I'm starting to consider if he needs a phone.

One issue we're coming up with is that he's meeting and making friends with other children who don't live nearby (as in, in our village, they're a train/bus journey away) and who are unlikely to be going to the same secondary school. I want to help him to maintain friendships, and it's getting more common for these other children to have phones and they want to add him to Whatsapp. So far we're using my phone.

We can't let him meet up with his friends on his own, he won't visit a friend's house without one of us with him - I'd love him to be more independent but on the other hand he might have a meltdown and it's not fair to leave that for someone else to deal with even if DS was willing.

My DS's friend apparently hacked in to the system and changed it so that he received the emails about detentions, etc instead of his parents.
I kind of wish my DS had done that, I am overwhelmed with school communication sometimes!

in this scenario it would be the school setting the destination of the cars and you only have access to it if you have a self drive car.

Met an mi5 security man once at a careers day. He was saying 98% of school hacks are pupils and most are successful

Yeah schools tech team could lock it all down. Problem is school tech team are not exactly very techhy. More just someone who completed one IT course a lot of the time who brands themselves as such.

School could have their own bloody app created and that be the only thing useable so only teachers can share with pupils and pupils to teachers but not to each other.

They use lazy tech though.

Yep, so pausing to consider and prioritise my dc’s age and future mental health- which includes starting threads to see if not having a smartphone will impact him too- is perfectly reasonable thing to do from a parent pov. I remain unconvinced that in year 7, age 11 that a smartphone is essential, a phone that can simply be used for calls and messages is probably more appropriate for outside school hours.

Then do that? Just don't expect other parents and kids to pick up the slack and put the work in to make up for it. It's that simple. You don't want him to have one so he doesn't have one. What other parents do is irrelevant.

Mapping apps have certainly been a bit of a lifesaver for my DS after he started secondary school. Sometimes the tube station nearest his school would be inaccessible and he'd have to find his way to the next one, which he would really have struggled with if he hadn't had a phone.

At 14 he and his friends can go into central London and find their way around using Google Maps with no trouble – more than I could have done at his age!

I just don't know the answer. Just thinking aloud here. It's such a worry. Knew nothing about air drop until speaking to my DS today. I only use android devices. Feel terrible he is almost finished formal education and I am only aware of this now. As a parent it's so difficult to know all of these loopholes over several types of devices.

As someone uptrend rightly said the genie is out the bottle.

Yes but many are sending inappropriate images/videos even when it's open during the class for the teacher to send educational content to all pupils.

It should be policed better or just disable air drop on all devices.

So a school could do this globally on school issued products?

You can block receiving airdrops.

Navigate to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions and toggle Content & Privacy Restrictions to on. Then tap Allowed Apps and toggle AirDrop to off

Another thing to ask my DS then!
I was thinking, surely the school can lock the ipads down more, but I am not sure about Air Drop, if someone has an image on their phone, is it easy to stop them sending it to someone else?
I know my DS would not report it (or indeed even tell me), but I would really like to hope that they wouldn't be receiving images on school issued products during lessons.