What is your secondary school doing about mobile phone policy?

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Our school are suggesting trackers as phones aren’t allowed on site or the commute either. This also includes brick phones. Crackers. How do I support the logic of this to my child?

In the corridor - should have been more specific!

That’s not shocking. DS’s school banned them too. He’s even been told to take of his conventional digital watch once

No longer permitted watches in formal exams due to smart watches existing.

The school my oldest initially went to had this rule from the offset. I told them that my child would be having a phone on the commute because they do not reliably check the children in and out of school. From inside the school grounds, you just press a button to exit certain gates depending on the time of day. You don't use an individual card to swipe out.

The school stays open until 7pm. During this time, not only are there students and staff supervising and participating in various activities from organised sports (set time to leave) to informal drama rehearsals and library revision (can leave any time), the school premises is rented out to the community for other activities. The main one involved sports training for secondary school aged children, but one involved a small group of adults using a space for a group interest.

There was a register taken of the students attending extracurricular activities, but this was not digital so if you called reception after about 5pm, there may not be anyone there and they couldn't reliably tell you where your child was in the school, or even if they were there at all. They'd have to tannoy and ask them to come to reception if they were there.

Bear in mind, they may keep your child back for detention of varying lengths with no warning or they could give your child a detention, and then postpone it at short notice as the person supposed to be supervising the detention has more pressing matters.

I advise everyone to double check the schools are on top of this kind of thing before they agree to not allow their children a phone at all.

Our school has always had an off and in their bag or in the teachers tray rule. Now the new schools been built which has absolutely no signal inside it teachers are a bit more relaxed, just no phones on obvious display.

20 years ago most adults had a mobile phone. Children generally didn’t, but there were working pay phones all over the place (even in rural areas) and every child knew how to use one to call home and say the bus or train had not turned up.

Actually I think 20 years ago, 2006 phones would have been becoming pretty common amongst secondary age kids.
My nephew would have started secondary around 2011, blackberries were all the rage, with a full keyboard, quicker to text on apparently!

My DD started secondary in 2010.
She was one of the very last in her primary class to get a phone, but we then bought her what was considered very swishby her peers - a touch screen phone.
By the end of secondary she had a cex iphone5 which we didn't allow data or Internet on.

I mean actually 20 years ago I had a mobile phone (PAYG, with strict instructions against use except in an emergency) for my school commute.

It was either a 4 and bit mile bike ride along ungritted (in winter) roads, a 3.5 mile walk if you cut across country but again that involved loads of roads with no pavement and unlit footpaths, or 2/3 mile walk along an unlit road with no pavement then an unlit footpath across a field to stand on an unlit field entrance where nobody else gathered (and this was after we had got them to add an extra stop to the bus route as the original stop was a 25 minute walk along an unlit road with no pavement). I used to have to wear wellies and take a torch in winter; school didn't finish til 4 and I wasn't back til well after dark.

Obviously I recognise that's not a standard school commute but it wasn't massively unusual for my area. My parents were extremely keen that I had a mobile so I could ring them if anything went wrong - like the bus not turning up.

I've been Googling from what I can work out it was around 2000-2003 that phones really became common amongst secondary age kids.

I got my first phone a Nokia 5110 in 1998 when I got my first car. You could buy all sorts of face plates and things for it. Phones were becoming mainstream amongst adults at that point. I think it was £17.50 a month with 100 text & 60min of calls

Quite - schools are banning something that has been used by secondary schoolchildren as a safety net on long and unreliable commutes for the best part of a quarter of a century, and what we used before - public phone boxes- no longer exists.

The rule doesn’t seem to apply to sixth form school/college. Out school has emailed to say they don’t require the pouches the young er children need and they can use their phones in the sixth form block but they must be off and out of site when around the younger children and wandering around main school.

Such a valid point.