To think all schools should ban the use of smartphones entirely during school day?

[90sseemedsomucheasier]

I would welcome a ban on smartphones in my child’s secondary school.

At present, in my child’s school they are allowed to take them in, but the rule is that they are to be kept at in their bags and not be seen at all. I think they get a couple of behaviour points if seen, and if seen for a third time then it is confiscated.

I know that, had smartphones existed when I was in school, I would have been a master a checking it without getting caught. I would have been on social media, messaging my friends, secretly listening to music with one AirPod under my hair, looking up answers to questions I didn’t know. I’d have never got in trouble because I would have been stealth like in my use of it. But it would have distracted me, it would have called out to me all day. I’d be waiting for my next check of it and thinking about it. I would therefore not have worked as hard, or chatted to friends as much. It would have fed me a horrible narrative about what I should look like, what my life should be like, how everyone appeared better than me and I’d be full of anxiety and not feel good enough.

This is what is happening to our children today. They don’t have the strength to stay away from them - they may not be seen doing it but they are constantly on them. Even the best behaved kids.

Even if teachers do notice a child having a quick look at their phone, they’ve got so much other stuff to do with the demands of their job - are they going to challenge the child and make more work for themselves or are they going to pretend they haven’t seen it.

Children take secret photos and videos and send them to one another to ridicule and bully. Inappropriate contest is airdropped and shared via WhatsApp groups.

As a parent, I am on it with internet safety (as is dh). We use parental control tools and my year 7 child is not allowed social media,free access to the internet and we monitor their use of their phone each evening. There are screen time limits and phone switches of at 7pm and is not allowed in bedroom.

I often feel like we are going against the grain in doing this. I feel alone and like other parents don’t see the issue with handing our children a device where they can access ANYTHING and absolutely will access anything because they are naturally curious. Curiosity is normal, but the level of information, the horrors, the ideologies and the algorithms that form as a result are not. They are extremely damaging.

I know, when I look online (I know, the irony) that there are other parents that feel the same way. But it is hard in real life. When you’re child goes to secondary school and makes new friends who went to a different primary you have no idea what their parents, and their parenting choices, are like.

Whilst I know my child is safe online in my home, I don’t know when I send them out to school. They can be exposed to all sorts of horrors / porn / ideologies because other parents send their child to school with unrestricted smartphones, whether that is because they don’t understand the dangers, or simply do not care.

do any other parents agree with me that schools should be made to ban smartphones entirely? And by ban I mean asking students to hand them in - either a locker or a faraday pouch on arrival. I get that they are a part of life and needed for safety on journey to and from school (although I would argue that for many they don’t actually even need it for that!). But during school hours they simply do not need them and should not have access to them.

This has been rolled out in some schools already and the benefits are already being seen. I would welcome it in a heartbeat if my child’s school did this!!

What do you think? Would really love to hear people’s opinions -

YABU - children should be allowed access to their phones throughout the school day

YANBU - all schools should ban smartphone access on school sites entirely by asking students to leave them at home, place them in a phone locker or in a faraday pouch

Well he doesn’t take it to school then or would face it being confiscated

Maybe if school wasn’t spending so much of the day dealing with phones then it wouldn’t be so shitty that it couldn’t be trusted to monitor children locking phones away safely.

Honestly, this thread is the perfect example of why state schools will never improve…all the numpty parents who believe that their feelings and beliefs matter more than children getting a good education. Us teachers are absolutely sick of you all. Do you know how many specialist maths teachers many of the schools I supply at have? None! That’s right! Just me on supply. All 20 of the maths teachers I qualified with have left the profession for many reasons but dealing with parents who wouldn’t support the school trying to do their best for all of the children was high up there. It’s just a shame that the children will suffer.

Sure @kingcake . My arguments are it's authoritarian, unrealistic and pompous to expect everyone you have to 'share decision making powers' with to align with your 'values' (if you can call a child having unfettered 24 hour access to a £600+ internet device a 'value') and if you don't like an institution's rules, alternatives including home schooling, are available.

Well I never said anything about unfettered 24 hour access. I simply don't want institutions stepping in and making blanket decisions that affect f my child, when I want to be the one to decide what is best for my own child. I accept that that sometimes means opting out of institutions and doing things like homeschooling. As I said, fortunately my child attends a school where I am on board with the rules and if I weren't we would look elsewhere. I just don't like blanket bans and confiscations when there are a lot of human individuals involved with different needs and ideas about things. I respect that you feel differently. I've lived in a lot of different countries and I find that in Britain there is a different attitude toward personal liberty than what I feel comfortable with. But it's a very interesting discussion.

@OldTiredMum1976 its a shame your posts are so angry and offensive resulting in name calling (ie. Parents being Numpty’s etc). I actually think you make some good points, but you lose moral high ground with your aggressive writing.

Im sure you teach your pupils to debate without resorting to derogatory terms when people’s opinions differ. Perhaps you should try it.

Do the posters who support phones in schools feel they themselves are able to adequately regulate their phone use?

I know I am not. And every other adult I’ve ever discussed this with considers their phone addiction a major drain on their quality of life too.

If you don’t feel your world at least slightly diminished by your excessive phone use that’s great. But you are in a tiny, tiny minority even among adults. Never mind children.

They trialled this at a school where I worked. There were definitely some positives but it also caused a lot of problems.

Kids refusing to hand phones in- this is to be expected of course, but what we weren't anticipating was the number of parents who kicked off when their child was given a sanction for refusing.

Kids would say they hadn't go their phone on them, that they'd left them at home. Then they'd skip lessons to sit in the toilets going on their phones. Again, this was expected but parents weren't always supportive of consequences being put in place and it took a lot of staff time to deal with it.

We were told by parents that we were "violating their child's human rights" by not allowing phones and a couple even refused to send their kids into school.

We agreed medical exemption for the small number of children who use their phone as a medical device. Cue an influx of children who apparently needed their phone on them all day "for their Mental Health", including children who we had never been informed had any Mental health concerns previously. We were accused of causing or worsening anxiety, traumatising children and taking their only coping strategy away from them.

One Dad threatened to call the Police as in his opinion we had "committed theft". Another parent accused us of only coming up with the policy :so teachers could snoop through kids phones"...because their child is so fascinating obviously.

When DD had hers confiscated she asked us to go to the school and demand her phone back as her human rights were being violated and it was theft 😂. We obviously told her to do one.

My son is at one of the schools which has banned smart phones this year, the head teacher has been in the national press talking about it.
I was sceptical at first but agree with the ban now

My DC’s school is using Yondr pouches from Easter and DC will be taking the pouches to and from home with them and putting phones in on entry to school, then tapping them to unlock at home time. They will be responsible for the pouches.

I imagine some DC will try and get around it by denying they have brought a phone with them or putting an old phone in the pouch if they’re checked but I still think this is better, as they keep their phones with them but locked up, than banning phones from school completely, locking them all up in an office which must take up a lot time and space (and potential claims for damage or loss) or expecting kids to be trusted not look at them during the day.

I do think schools who haven’t got the funds to implement pouches (about £25 per pouch probably discounted for buying hundreds at a time though), should ask parents to contribute as it will benefit their DC’s education and social interactions, and they are supplying the offending phones.

My DC has a medical condition he needs his phone for so is exempt but I wouldn’t have minded contributing to a pouch if he wasn’t.

If you’d spent the last 3 days in schools trying to prepare children for their GCSE maths exams in the conditions I am working in then you would be aggressive.

In just 3 days I’ve dealt with porn on a phone, bullying over WhatsApp across the classroom, watching YouTube, listening to music with headphones, videoing other people in the class and taking photos of a girl whose button on her blouse had come undone - all in GCSE maths classes. Meanwhile, I have children crying in the class because they know they are going to fail because 1) they haven’t had a proper maths teacher at all since year 7, 2) every lesson is disrupted mainly with phones. I’ve been parachuted in to try and salvage the situation.

So yes, I will call parents who don’t want schools to make changes numpties…because they are! And selfish - they can’t see the bigger picture. I spend all week being polite and professional to these idiots at schools - I won’t on here.

I am being charged a lot of money in VAT for sending my children to a private school so that they can avoid this chaos…the least the government could do would be to spend a bit of it solving this phone problem in state schools…but they won’t. Not a penny will go to state schools because the schools they send their children to are private if not in name - children selected on the cost of their house. They don’t have these problems.

You don't know much about how pimpscand cgms work, do you? We have both a phone and a pdm (looks like a phone) and they are an essential part of type 1 management. They will not be removed from type 1 children whatever a school decides to do.

Pimps?! Pumps!!!!!

I’m lucky that my child goes to a school where they remove the phones at the beginning of the day and give them back at the end (so they have them in case of emergency on the way to and from school).

i also have his phone set up so that it switches to ‘downtime’ from 8pm. From that point it is totally shut down other than two functions, messaging and calling me or my husband and audio books. Surely you could do something similar on your child’a phone during school hours so that it is on downtime but they can reach you in an emergency?

broadly though, I agree - they should be banned in school and social media should be banned until 16, with proper checks on account creation to verify the person’s age.

No I don’t but I do know that technology can be created without having to have an entire mobile phone attached to it. However - I fully appreciate that this isn’t the case at the moment and is a whole other thread.

it goes to say that anyone who needs their phone for medical devices should absolutely keep them with them. They NEED them. Anyone else does not.

I really hand on heart, hope you aren’t aggressive, despite the trials and tribulations of a classroom.

My child’s phone is not the issue at all. Life would be very simple if that was the case. It is essentially a dumb phone.

I really hope @Pippa12, hand on heart- that you can tell the difference between offline and online - but I’m not holding out much hope.

@OldTiredMum1976 that sounds like hell. And people wonder why parents who can remove their children from these places.

I think they’re talking about the language being used in their posts rather than being aggressive to students (in response to what a previous poster said.)

I don’t blame them either as it is such a fucked up, dire situation

OP why do you say they are needed on the journey to and from school? What did you do at that age?
My adult DC are in their 30s and got Nokia bricks when they were towards end of high school none of them or their friends were allowed phones in school or on school buses etc
My generation managed without communicating with our parents between leaving home around 8am and returning at 4.30, both my parents were at work anyway
Thankfully if I hadn’t have arrived at school or some incident occurred during the day - the school would contact either of my parents on a work landline or any other local relatives whose contact details had been given
We didn’t have a landline at home until I was 14/15 even

I wrote to my MP.

I get that they are a part of life and needed for safety on journey to and from school (although I would argue that for many they don’t actually even need it for that!).

That is what I said about that. So as you can probably tell, you don’t need to convince me much about that.

However, I appreciate that this is where phones are useful and we can ensure safety of our children in a way that couldn’t be done when we were children. If children are travelling a long way to school, getting public transport etc I think most parents will want their child to have a phone. It really doesn’t need to be a smart phone though! At all.

In my dream world, smart phones would be banned for children and they could all have a Nokia brick. That way, it is a useful tool and not a danger or distraction (well, apart from the odd bit of snake).

medical / travel etc infrastructure would be designed in a way that they didn’t have to rely on a smart phone.

This is why having it as law would help.

Exactly. A lot of parents seem to be very naïve about the lengths that phone-addicted teens will go to in order to use their phones in school. I mean... vapes aren't allowed in school either. Does that stop kids from vaping in school? Nope.

In schools where they collect in the phones at the beginning of the day, what's to stop kids from saying they don't have their phone with them? Or handing in an old phone and keeping their actual one in their bag?

In schools where phones have to be switched off and kept in bags, they aren't. They're on silent. They get taken to the toilet (in fact they, along with vaping, are almost certainly the main reason for the totally excessive number of lesson-time toilet trips).

Then he would not be able to take it to school. Easy.