New phone policy

😂I would actually call the police if they tried to take my child's phone for longer than the end of a school day. That's theft.

That's exactly why teachers are leaving the profession in droves

OP hasn't returned so I smell wind-up

It's a good rule. It will be of benefit to your DS in his final year because it will ensure his teachers are focused on the lesson they are teaching rather than monitoring phone/smart watch use. You have no idea how much of a problem and distraction these items are in school. The school will have been having serious issues before coming up with this policy.

You should be happy, because this is an important year for him and his education is the priority, not step counting or whatever he wanted to do with the fitness watch. Support the school. Tell him not to take the watch to school. Then it will not be confiscated. You or he would only have to be concerned about the strongest sanction if he was planning to continue repeatedly wearing it, despite the rule and warnings.

Why are you worried about his final school year? Have you supported the schools policy or are you winding him up and making him angry by telling him it is excessive?

If he doesn't break the rules there will be no problems. Tell him if he does break the rules then compounds that by not handing over his phone/watch and gets a sanction you will be taking both the phone/watch off him at home instead until the school exclusion/sanction is completed.

You are making a rule not to have phones in school into a bigger deal than it needs to be.

They can't dispose of their phones. It's not like they are taking a knife or coke. Most would prefer having them to and from school to feel safe. Although yes they shouldn't be used in school it will be hard to break the habit though.

No, it isn't theft. The law allows schools to seize any prohibited item, which includes items banned by the school rules. They can retain it or dispose of it. They do not have to return it to the owner. They must, however, act in a way that is fair, reasonable and proportionate taking into account the pupil's age, any special educational needs or disability, and religious requirements. If you called the police, they would ignore you.

It sounds like a fairly normal policy to me OP, most school that allow phones to be brought in don't allow them to be out/visible/used in lessons. Same with the (connected) watches. Classrooms and exam halls have clocks.

My advice would be not to wear the watch, if he's going in to Year 11 then it's just one more year (and probably not even a full year at that). He can't wear it for exams either.

These sound like excellent rules. Just buy your son a cheap "normal" watch for school, and then he can wear his smart watch the rest of the time.
Nobody needs to take phones or gadgets into school, and parents have to support the schools.

That's just hilarious. Good luck with engaging officers to take up your cause.

Show's just how out of touch you are you think the police have time to talk to a school because your DC's phone has been legally confiscated.

Round here, theft involves a car of approx £70k being stolen and even that, it takes a weeks for anything to turn up that might help crack the case. Anything less than that and they're not interested.

Parents really don't know when to pull back these days, do they? It's all about me me me me me me me me.....

And the police wouldn’t entertain you because it isn’t theft. Parents who behave like this are the root of a lot of the problems in schools 🙄

I would actually call the police if they tried to take my child's phone for longer than the end of a school day. That's theft.

And yes, I agree my children's shouldn't have their phones out at school. They should be turned off in the bottom of their school bags. But shit happens, often in the form of their 'friends'. But our schedule is insane with all kinds of changes and travel to various things, and I need to be able to reach them after school hours.

The obvious thing to do is to leave everything at home

When I was at secondary school in the Nineties I didn't have a phone or watch and I survived just fine

Kids are there to learn not piss about on their phones. It's clearly a huge problem which is why such rules have been introduced

So if a school set a rule that would ban any type of watch as they can be distracting (only imagine the kids would know how many minutes it is till the break time! huge distraction), then it will also be ok, because it is a school rule?

I know you’ve given this as an extreme example
but for what it’s worth this is now the case for all public exams (in E & W at least - I’m not sure of the situation in Scotland). All watches of any sort, ‘smart’ or ‘dumb’, Garmins included, are now banned by the JCQ. It is an absolute nightmare in my subject as students have to manage their time very carefully in our GCSE paper. I know of several schools who have had to buy new large digital clocks for the exam halls as too many students couldn’t confidently read the existing analogue clocks.

prh47bridge
If a Y11 child insists on wearing a watch that is banned by the school, the courts would definitely uphold the school's right to retain it for half a term following a third offence.

So if a school set a rule that would ban any type of watch as they can be distracting (only imagine the kids would know how many minutes it is till the break time! huge distraction), then it will also be ok, because it is a school rule?

There is a big difference between rules and authority, on the one hand, and right and reasonable things to do on the other.

School staff have too much of unquestionable power. Who else can legally confiscate, destroy or dispose of your child's watch?

This is a new rule at DDS school. Starting next week. I assumed they could take their phone to use on the way home? I like to track my daughter as she gets the bus.

The only issue I have is if she's upset / ill she can't message me. 3 times she's come home early and each time the office told her to go find the head of year which she never could or to go back at break then lunch. So I phoned the office to say I give her permission to come home. Otherwise she would be in school ill.

I agree phones aren't good during school. The kids use their phones in class and film other kids / fights.

Luckily the only consequence is the phone is taken off then until the end of that day and they have an hour detention that same day.

I was hoping if dd needed me she could use her phone in the toilet but if everyone did that the toilets would be constantly locked. Maybe this will cause more issues with no one being able to have a wee in school?

The argument that we all managed without phones is ridiculous. People managed without cars / washing machines / electricity but that doesn't mean we don't need them now. Kids don't know a life without phones.

Our school is introducing a strict phone policy too but any confiscations are only until the end of the day, because so many pupils have their bus passes digitally on their phones.

A friend of mine who is a teacher said 95 per cent of bullying incidents involve phones so I would welcome this approach.

Your post is funny esp the part about his insistence over this policy being unacceptable.

He's that child and you're that parent..

Seems very sensible. One local school took it further and second offence is keeping the device until the end of term.

Parents sign a contract to can't argue and they have really good GCSE results.

does anyone know if it's legal for a school to confiscate a phone/watch for up to 7 weeks?

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is that the school can confiscate, retain or destroy/dispose of any item belonging to a pupil provided it is fair, reasonably and proportionate to do so taking into account the pupil's age, any special educational needs or disability, and religious requirements. If a Y11 child insists on wearing a watch that is banned by the school, the courts would definitely uphold the school's right to retain it for half a term following a third offence.

I didn't mean they should've guessed this specific boy planned to spend the summer working to earn money for a Garmin watch, I mean in general it's good to give as much advance notice about changes in rules as possible. Sometimes rules have to change suddenly, but often it's been obvious there's an issue for a while (like with phones and smartwatches in school), and since the change may require people to do things differently or make different purchasing or budgeting choices it's fairly reasonable to give some notice. If there's been no notice and the lack of notice causes the rule change to have a financial or other difficult impact on people, then it can be upsetting. I'm talking about why it's unfair on the boy to mock him for being upset ("diddums"), rather than what rules schools should have around phones and smartwatches.

. The school could've indicated much earlier that rules on wearables were changing from this September, but didn't bother, so he's wasted a lot of his work

I am guessing that the school didn't know he was planning on buying the watch, or when.

There are rules about different things everywhere and if you want to take part you need to follow them. Rules can also change. I understand it disappointing but it's just the way it is. It'll be the same when he gets a job.

I guess you're not familiar with this kind of wearable and why he'll be so upset about this rule change. Unless it's been bought specifically to monitor particular out-of-school workouts or sport sessions, the point of watches like this is usually to constantly gather data about your daily activity and body functions. A lot of the data gathered is fairly useless unless you're wearing the watch nearly all the time. It's not like a normal watch, or something like a handheld games console or a music player, where your enjoyment of the item at other times is unaffected by a schoolday ban. He'll be upset because the thing he worked for over the summer believing it would be accepted in school has now been made pretty much useless. The school could've indicated much earlier that rules on wearables were changing from this September, but didn't bother, so he's wasted a lot of his work.

But I don't agree with school who remove their possessions for weeks on end.

I think removal until end of day and use school sanctions and escalation of those sanctions.

I've never agreed it's up to school to dictate if pupils have their phones outside of school or not and should not be sending kids home without phones that parents believe they are travelling with.

The easy thing is he doesn't wear expensive watch to school if he doesn't want to lose it.

My school even has this policy for staff.

Smart watches are a.lowed but the connectivity to phones must be disconnected when working.

Phones must be in bags in classroom cupboards and cannot be on the person.

So I'd want to clarify a watch that records steps etc is ok if not connected to the phone. Purely because some will class a smart watch as anything outside a digital or analogue which means most students wearing a watch are at risk with what's on the market nowadays!