Ban on mobile phones in schools

[bytheby]

Gavin Williams has proposed this and announced a 6 week consultation. Does anyone know how we can feed into the consultation?

I am in favour. In fact I don't think children/teens need phones at all. If people are worried about safety walking home then there should be a simple phone with a map function and ability to call available.

I am a sensible adult and I find it difficult to control my own mobile phone use so how can we expect children to.

Children accessing porn. Children unable to 'switch off'/addicted to screens. Children being contacted by older strangers. Children having unrealistic images of how they 'should' look pushed onto them by social media. Children unable to escape school bullying (or just a break from their peers) at home. Children losing the ability to converse. Children more anxious than ever. etc etc.

If your childhood was pre mobile phones do you think it honestly would have been improved by having one?!

Anyway, if anyone knows how to become a part of the consultation please let me know! I have googled to no avail.

Phones are a pain in the classroom. They don't turn them off and they get calls - often from other who have been let out to go to the toilet, or even from parents. They get lost or stolen and it is always the teachers at fault.

If you try to ban them then amazingly the world and his wife has a sick mother and so they need to keep their phone for a call that could come at any minute. Or at the age of 16 they need it because they have a long walk home and something terrible might happen to them. The long walk home is rarely more than 2 miles along well lit roads.

The parents will fight tooth and nail for their children to keep their phones. If a suggestion is made that if they truely do need one for emergencies then a very cheap PAYE would do you are looked at as if you are some kind of monster.

I would love a ban but it will not happen.

@bytheby

All of your in favour of phones do you really think your child needs a smartphone?

You wouldn't rather them have a device that would be created to suit their needs (SEN or otherwise)?

I despair! It is so clear that children are unhappier overall.

Do I really NEED a smartphone? Well, possibly not but it makes my life easier. Just like it makes my DD's life easier when she was at school and like it does now she is as university.

My Dd is perfectly happy and perfectly capable of managing her phone use, as am I.

Would I prefer us to have a much simpler, more primitive device, more like I may have had growing up? No, of course not.

Mind, I spend my week teaching reception and key stage 1 computing so I really have little desire to scrap technology in childhood. I teach children to use it safely and effectively, learning to know when and where it is appropriate and teaching them to be become competent and capable users. Why would I want to get rid of that?!

Good luck enforcing a ban in schools, I agree they shouldn’t have them but parents won’t abide by it.

Last week my Dd texted me after school twice - once to tell me she was going into town with a friend, once to say she was going to a rehearsal she hadn't known about.

If I'd been in the same situation when I was at school, I'd have had to ask a teacher to use the school pay phone, or use a phone-box. But those aren't available to Dd.

Her choice would have been either miss the rehearsal and trip with friends, or not show up at home and have me worry.

I think it's ironic that the government expect every adult to download an app and carry a smartphone at all times for Test and Trace, but schoolchildren can't even be trusted to have them switched off in the bottom of their bag.

There are ways around the issues people are highlighting.
For example, if the students use their phones to take photos of the homework set/ board, the teacher can be asked to email the PowerPoint to their classes to be accessed at home.
I think phones cause so many issues in schools now that we have to think of ways to function well without them.

Phones can be used to control cochlear implants too.

One of DD's friends uses hers to enable a seizure alert and alarm, as well as using it to monitor her tics - all stemmed from a virus she caught two years ago.

Another friend has all her medi alert stuff in hers due to a health condition where she needs medical information at the ready.

Another has her diabetes information and alert on hers.

Our senior school has a ban on phones at school. The kids can have them but they are confiscated if seen. Sadly it doesn’t always work but I think it’s a good idea. When my daughter was bullied she was constantly filmed in school and it splashed all over social media. It was a horrible time for her

I have worked in schools and banning them means Jack shit. They still all have them, they still all use them and it takes up valuable staff time trying to police it all.

Education is needed in the use of mobiles, they have a place in modern society, but we need to teach students how to use them safely. That is the key to this issue in schools.

As an accessibility aid surely it would be better for schools to provide appropriate equipment?

Who is paying for it all?
Schools weren't even given money to pay towards hand sanitiser let alone specific accessibility aids!

And why do children need to then have a series of difference devices for each need rather than one small device which can do it all?

So they carry one device or tool for accessibility, another for text book, another calculator, another for SEN medi-Alert or information, carry a homework diary, etc. But surely one device that can do all is better in many ways?

There are ways around the issues people are highlighting.

Is there one readily available way round all the issues people are highlighting?

Schools should have the power to decide for themselves. School in a rural area where buses are unreliable might make a different decision compared with a school with a 0.4mile catchment radius. My children are singled out enough as it is for using laptops in class, why should they then have to rely on some 'special' device made by one of Boris's cronies which would probably cost more due to being a niche purchase (no doubt up to the parents to pay), to identify them even more as different when a smart phone does the same job. Mine don't have Instagram/ snap chat etc, mainly down to their choice now we have let them use WhatsApp which they just use with friends. The government should concentrate on giving school and police the budgets to manage the causes of disruptive behaviour not legislate on mobile phones.

They should actively use them in the classroom, a much more realistic example of working life and full opportunity to model effective and safe use. I wouldn’t support a ban, it’s a rubbish way of teaching children how to use their phones effectively.

@AllTheUsernamesAreAlreadyTaken

There are ways around the issues people are highlighting. For example, if the students use their phones to take photos of the homework set/ board, the teacher can be asked to email the PowerPoint to their classes to be accessed at home. I think phones cause so many issues in schools now that we have to think of ways to function well without them.

Yeah, because all the information we could ever need is already on the PowerPoint, teachers have loads of time to upload more stuff to SMHW/Teams etc…

I think phones being so many benefits to society we have to think of ways to function well with them.

DS's school had a 'cheap phone' and not for general use in school policy. Seemed to work well generally. DD's school on the other hand seems to operate a phone free-for-all which seems to work much less well. I'd be in favour of it.

And as for saying mobile phones keep DC safe when they're out and about, I'm not convinced they necessarily do.

Cinnamon star, what about the choice of being late home without telling you, do we have to panic in every situation?

Totally agree; they should never have been allowed in the first place.

There should be a blanket ban on phones for under 18s.

My daughter’s school has had a ban on mobile phones for the past three years, they use a product called a Yondr pouch which is a self locking pouch that works with strong magnets (I think). They are supervised locking their phones in as they arrive and then their teacher unlocks them at the end of the school day. Productivity increased and bullying reduced as a result, I am in favour. A few kids have found a work around but the punishments are strong should they be caught with their phones so the vast majority of the kids have just accepted it as part of school life.
We managed for generations without phones in schools and our children can do it too! I’m sure there would be allowances for SEN but for anything else the kids would have to find an old fashioned way around it, e.g. a calculator, which is hardly in the same bracket as a slide rule or whatever, and kids need one for GCSE anyway as they’re hardly going to be allowed to rock up to their maths exam with an internet enabled phone!

There are a lot of children that will be less safe on the journey to and from school and some sadly in school too.

We forget there was a whole communication infrastructure that existed prior to smart phones. Every train station had (several) phone boxes, there were phone boxes scattered around the country and at least one in most schools. That does not now exist.

@SuperCaliFragalistic

It's unrealistic. It will end up like prisons where phones are readily available under the radar. Better controls over what children can access and better education about the pros and cons of using devices sounds more likely to be a long term solution. We aren't going back to the 1950s no matter how rose tinted your glasses are.

Prison TikToks are actually really funny, I've seen some great ones.

Mac ncheese, Dd has some medical issues that mean I would have to worry, yes. Having a phone allows her some independence.

I'm surprised any schools are allowing them. It's not like I can walk around in my work with a device capable of recording, filming, transmitting and taking pictures, the school aren't safeguarding the students.
If you want kids to learn they can't have access to these things all day, you can see productivity bomb.

DC get mugged for high-end phones, don't pay attention when crossing roads etc., are so busy listening to stuff with earphones on they're totally unaware of potential dangers around them. They have phones to keep in contact with parents and home but what happens when the phone runs out of charge just when they need it on them (i.e. they're planning on coming home when it's dark!) or being able to communicate with parents means they go roaming off somewhere you'd rather they hadn't gone.

All of the things you have stated in your OP are just about general mobile phone use in secondary age children though - they are not a reason why they shouldn't specifically be used in school. Actually they are mostly "out of school" things.

My DC's school (like many others I assume) already has its own rules around phones - basically that they can't be used in lessons unless the teacher agrees. So that's things like using educational apps, looking stuff up in the online text book, taking photos (of stuff on the board, or for source photos for Art) etc.

Like others on the thread, I find they are useful for my DC to contact me during the day with last minute plans. The in-school telephones that used to be available to me in a pre-mobile era are no longer there - there is no other way to do this.

And, I agree with others. This is a distraction to take away from all the actual issues in education at the moment. 250,000 children out of school? No plans yet for GCSE/A Levels next summer?

We managed for generations without phones in schools and our children can do it too!

We managed for generations without lots of things.

It really isn't a valid argument at all