School confiscating phone

[Whatshouldmynamebe321]

AIBU to think secondary school should not keep confiscated mobile phone overnight?

12 year old dd walks home alone and school had confiscated her phone during the day (this I fully support as discipline for breaching rules).
But they refused to return at end of day unless a parent collects it.

I'm a single parent and work fulltime, so unavailable during school opening hours to collect it. I feel very upset the school see fit to send her off on a lone walk home without it. I was oblivious, at work assuming she has the device to call for help if there was an emergency. We don't have a landline so, it remains her only method of communication if a disaster happened at home.

Do other schools do this?
I don't understand the logic of it having to be returned to a parent. Surely most parents work and are unable to collect before the school closes which is about 4pm.

A child with type 1 diabetes will have a care plan with the school. Use of phone would be in the care plan.

Absolutely and 100% not true.

Neither of my two ever had a care plan at any of the schools they went to.

What would happen if they had a hypo at school then? Was there no plan in place? I would be appalled at them not having a plan

@thing47 are they older now? All schools I have worked in students have had care plans for diabetes. I know it's more a recent thing though.
When I look at the difference between my boys regarding their treatment in school for autism it's massive as well.

Apologies, I didn't know there were a common thing now. My youngest left school 4 years ago.

In answer to what they did, they both managed their own diabetes from quite an early age, including dealing with hypos and doing their own tests and injections.

Parents have top up a student account online so they can buy lunch/snacks etc. School trips, and even tickets for the school performances have to be paid via a website.
I believe that if you have issues with online payments you can take (for example) a tenner to the office and they will top up the account for you, but other than that carrying any sort of cash is strongly discouraged.

Cash costs the school in terms of counting it and arranging for it to be picked up for banking.

Personally I think children should have a note tucked away in their bag, unless they have a card, for emergencies.

There are also debit cards like Go Henry that (while intended for pocket money) could be useful in the bottom of the bag for emergencies.

I had an emergency involving needing to buy a glass of wine and having forgotten my cards and DD's came in rather handy 😂.

My school does this after the 2nd time they have been caught with their phone around the school. It doesn’t matter if in lessons or lunch time - that’s actually when a lot of bullying, filming other students, etc takes place. Stop making excuses for your children, they don’t need their phone to walk home, we all managed it. Follow the rules, end off!!

@JMKid all that happened to the OP was that they got their phone out. There's no suggestion that they did any of these things.
Blanket bans like this are a stupid waste of time, why not trust kids and deal with actual problems like bullying and filming when they arise. Saying to teenagers that if they get their phones out they will be confiscated is just asking for a challenge, since teenage brains are very similar to toddler brains!
Schools should be aiming to get the majority of kids to use phones normally at breaks and lunch in a similar way to adults and sanctions should only be for kids that break those rules and should be proportionate. Confiscation needs to be a last resort and then only for one lesson - a far better punishment would be whatever sanctions you'd use if a child disrupted the lesson without a phone eg if they stood up and called out you'd hardly be able to confiscate their voice !
Making phones into a huge thing is putting high value on them and teenagers know this.
In other news, using phones to harass, threaten, take dodgy images etc are all criminal offences and this should be hammered home to kids and families- and every incident reported to the police.

@ismu I'd love to see a school try that approach. I'm not sure any learning at all would happen and God knows little enough does at the moment at times.

We are all aware that the Silicon Valley types who design these addictive devices send their DCs to schools where phones are completely banned, yes?

@Phineyj there are plenty of schools where this happens!
But most of them are either private or aren't in the UK and don't require kids to conform to rigid rules that adults would never tolerate for a second.

The rule is deliberately designed to be a massive PITA for parents, so that they re-enforce the message at home.

This is the consequences of your DDs behaviour I'm afraid. No sympathy.

My experience differs. The independent I worked in was very strict on no phone use in years 7-9. Because the girls weren't mature enough and cyberbullying is a real problem.

They'd have never kept a phone overnight thought. The parents would have been creating!

I did work in a (state) grammar where they were more permissive, but the behaviour was pretty good so the students could on the whole be trusted even at 11.

The boy who had to walk all those miles home wasnt even using his phone. It just fell out of his bag. In that instance power was abused.

The thing parents forget is that teachers (I am one) don't actually like taking phones off kids. Surprisingly, we would rather the kid actually took notice of the lesson without having their phone out, rather that us having to stop the lesson to take it away from them. It's all very well saying give it back at the end of the day, but actually THINK. If I said to you "I am going to put your phone somewhere really safe, during a few hours when you can't use it anyway and then give it back you you as soon as you can use it again" would you actually care much? - probably not. The reason we keep the phone overnight is that we want them to CARE they had their phone taken away and to therefore NOT play with it again in lessons, so that we, and the 30 other kids in the class, are NOT disrupted by your child on their phone AGAIN! Also if one of those kids decides that your child took a photo of them with said phone, however much they may be wrong, hell they may have made it up because they hate "Jonny" (may because he always finds a way to disrupt classes) we have a much bigger safeguarding situation on our hands which could lead to Jonny and the school being in potential serious legal trouble. Bottom line is, if Jonny needs a phone on the walk home, or so that you can get him to get his little sibling from school, make sure Jonny knows to keep his phone in his bag in school - it REALLY ISN'T hard!

trick is trying to get everyone on the thread to consider this point

@stichguru ,

I don’t really agree with that. I also taught for 10 years and neither of my schools would take phones overnight.

The first school, which was ‘gentler’ just made the pupil collect it at the end of the day from a senior pastoral leader (head of whichever section of the school the pupil was in). The deterrent was waiting outside the office for 10 minutes or so and then a talking to. My second school, which was much stricter, gave an hour and a half detention on a Saturday morning from being caught using a phone when not allowed. Children will always try, but at neither school was phone use a major problem.

There are big issues with taking phones outside school hours including what happens if the school is broken into and the phone is stollen, together with the perceived safety issue of leaving a relatively small child with no means of contacting their parents if they have a problem (no money and stranded, for instance).

Schools need effective behaviour management policies but they should not undermine parents or try to remain in loco parentis when the child is not at school (which is effectively what confiscating a phone overnight Implies).

When it comes to mobile phones, schools don't.care whether you agree with the punishment or not. The nasty things that pupils get up to are horrifying, sometimes illegal eg humiliating things like an attack on a pupil get filmed and put up on you tube. Sometimes staff get targeted and put up. Terrifying bullying can take place via a phone.
There are dozens of good reasons why people should prevent their children carrying a phone to school.
This will sound harsh but your after school arrangements for your child are your.responsibility, not ours. You should.have taught him about the penalty for misbehaving with a phone.