AIBU to ask for advice on how to overturn a school decision - quickly

I would report the incident to the police and get a crime reference number. I’d then meet with the school explain the incident and follow up the discussion in writing (email), bullet point and include the crime reference number and how having a phone could have changed the situation. (Phoning the police or an ambulance for example).

Always follow up a meeting in writing so you have a time stamped documented email trail. In this instance clearly highlight the safety issue caused by no brick mobile phone and the staff members responses. Ask why no pouches or other options were chosen? What do other schools use in your area?

Do any schools use this?
https://parentshield.co.uk/block-mobiles-during-school-hours/

My child doesn’t take a phone to school (secondary) however I don’t agree with a blanket ban. My biggest concern is them not being able to record an incident in school and the school denying the incident occurred. Too many schools are going into lock down in my county (masked men, knife, people scaling the fence) and it is clear the schools/gov would prefer to keep these incidents quiet. They can’t deny it if there is video footage. This enables parents to make informed decisions on a school.

I wouldn’t opt for a school with a blanket ban and I say that as someone who has a child that has never taken a phone to school.

And one used as a CGM or HA connector is exempt. So is completely irrelevant to this.

Children and adults with type 1 diabetes use their mobile phones to monitor their blood sugar and alert them when it gets too high or low. For some people a smartphone is literally life saving. Before this technology was available these children had to perform regular finger prick tests to check their blood sugar. Mobile phones provide constant monitoring, much better control and as a result reduce the risk of blindness, kidney failure and amputation. So yes, some people do need a mobile phone.

Love this. I hid my sons nokia brick phone in a packable rain coat for three years. Then the school allowed mobile phones. This is 12 years ago but regardless of when it was phones are so useful when our kids are commuting to school.

But why should the school dictate whether she gets to carry a phone on her journey to/from school (which, by banning them altogether they are)? People DO need phones these days. The world is not set up for people not to have phones like it was in the 90s with phone boxes on every street corner. I’m all for keeping kids off smartphones but I think if schools go too far like this there’s bound to be a backlash. Just allow brick phones and require them to be switched off all day at school. Then the child can still contact you if they need to on their journey home

Of course a phone makes a difference to your safety - group of kids get into fight with other group of kids in secluded area. One kid ends up getting stabbed. None of his friends have a phone so no one can call an ambulance. There’s no phone box nearby cos it’s not the 90s and it’s a secluded area so there’s no people nearby to ask. They can run to the nearest person/shop to get help but that could take 10-15 min, by which time the kid has lost so much blood he’s died. If they could have called for help immediately on a mobile he’d have a chance at survival

No teacher is going to chase a child down and snatch a phone.
no governing body would allow that in their Mobile phone policy.
just tell your child not to use it in school according to the rules

If a teacher is on a journey home and sees a child on a phone, they will “chase them down the street and snatch it out of their hand” as it shows they had a phone in school.

Yes because this totally happened didn’t it 🙄

Of course teachers don’t have their own children, partners, friends, family, date nights, hobbies etc - they just hang around school waiting to chase down students and snatch their phones from them 🤦‍♀️

You do realise like any other profession, teachers can’t wait to get home at the end of the day.
Half of them will have young kids that they need to collect by a certain time.

The school has no jurisdiction as to what pupils do with a phone on the way home from school. If this is written into official policy, it's a huge overstep on their part. If it were I'd just send them an email saying their policy is noted but please note that my DD is given permission by me to use her phone appropriately on the way home from school.

I assume the school give you a printed timetable or provide diaries so they can copy their timetable into them and don't require any tech usage for homework?

A few years ago DD's school in the late 2010s, before she went, got into trouble in the national press for insisting everyone buy an iPad for use in school.

When she was there (from 2020) they made all the kids do their homework on devices and having them install at least five different apps for the purpose.

This is an ostensibly wealthy area but where there is actually a huge disparity and many families who are not well-off.

We bought/built a PC for each DD but in 2020 many families did not have a device each for everyone in the house and no printer (we printed and laminated a timetable for DD2 as kids would regularly get in trouble for phone usage in the corridor, in spite of the timetable only being available on their phones unless you copied/printed it off/bought them a diary for the same). We were very IT literate but still had plenty of tech issues. It was a part time job on top of our FT job helping DD2 (with SEN) with homework (just getting access to even do it!)

Interesting now they are going back to homework in exercise books and provide a homework diary for the timetable and homework to be written into and handed in and marked. I wish they had when DD was there. One feature of the apps and homework being automatically marked was that there was two or three times the amount set than I had at school, straight away from Y7 also, and more than DD1 had in a superselective grammar. It was crazy.

I think they and Moose are trolls- I wouldn’t bother engaging with this degree of utter nonsense, they are wind up merchants as no one could be this ignorant.