I think it’s hard for us who didn’t grow up with phones to imagine the difficulties phones call within schools. There is the ringing in lessons, looking at them under the desk, inappropriate material brought into school, bullying, theft, 24/7 communication with parents……the list goes on. Of course they are part of life now and there are undoubtedly loads of very good points and most of us wouldn’t want to be without our phones.
But sometimes people struggle to see the issues of managing over 1000 or over 2000 teens with these and the issues. Each incident is ‘just’ one incident and not always intended. It is September and like uniform, schools know that they need to start off firm and clear because otherwise it all runs away with itself and becomes impossible to rein back in.
So schools do need to have a policy and to implement it. Some schools will be stricter than others. Some won’t confiscate, some will do it for a day and others for longer. Some will use detentions or other sanctions. Quite often, parents don’t feel a sanction is totally fair and quite often they want to step in and defend their child and argue against the sanction. I would say that parents need to think about some of the bigger principles of generally supporting the school and allowing the school to decide the sanction, rather than expecting it to tailor its sanctions to each individual child and what their parent wants. There will be very occasional circumstances where it’s right for a parent to get invovled and oppose a sanction……but these are likely to be incredibly rare and many parents won’t ever need to do it in an entire secondary career.
So, rather than getting het up and furious about the denial of a phone, or coming up with lots of possible scenarios which might make a phone something that simply cannot be taken away for a very small number of students (medical) and which don’t apply here, persoanlly, I’d be saying to my child ‘Yes,it does seem a harsh punishment. It’s harsher than I’d expect, but your phone did ring and now you have to just accept the consequence. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean the phone to ring and thought it was turned off. It’s just one of those things the school feels strongly about and uses this approach. You will manage for the week. We can do X, Y and Z to make it work. You can feel a bit disgruntled…that’s fine, but it’s something we just have to suck up. We will support the school with its approach even if we think it’s a it harsh. And you won’t let it ring again will you. Let’s not make it into a bigger deal than it needs to be. Onwards and uowards’