Work mobile phones?

[good96]

Hope everyone is having a great summer!
I’ve had a meeting with the CEO of the academy trust today along with other headteachers in the trust and he has mentioned about issuing work mobile phones to all senior leaders and teaching staff in every school across the trust….

Personally, I can see the need for SLT having a work phone but I think it’s an excessive cost for every teacher to have one - what on earth would they need it for when they have laptops?
I challenged back and said it’s not necessary - only the ones with a work phone should be the HT and SLT and the site team that is it…..
Be interested to see if other schools have rolled out mobile phone devices across the school?

Oh my, I’ve never heard of this and don’t like the sound of it. What on earth would we need them for? Is this for them to be able to contact us easily out of school hours, or to use within class time? I guess if they were just for during school hours like “ring SLT if there’s a behaviour issue ans you need support ASAP” then this is fine (we all have landlines and internal numbers to ring when this happens on our classroom doors, so we wouldn’t need a mobile phone as we can use these whenever we need) but if it was to contact us on evenings/weekends then hell no!

I absolutely agree. In the school that I’ve just left; every classroom had a landline that could make/receive internal calls across the school. My new school doesn’t have this and instead just in departmental offices. They are used for emergencies or if the teacher needs to call pastoral support or another teacher etc.

There’s no need for teaching staff to have a work phone, they’re on the same site and everyone has teams that we can all communicate through!
I can understand the need for the SLT and site teams to have them….as there could be an emergency at the other end of the school that requires urgent support…

At my current school all staff have mobile phones. This has been the case for a few years now.

We had them at one school I worked at and they were great.

• calling parents from my desk during frees/after school, instead of writing a confidential number down and finding an empty office.
• the paperwork since covid for lots of school trips I run is virtual and I need apps or QR codes on an email. If these trips are abroad, then I have to pay roaming rates from my personal accounts to access these.
• 2 factor authentication. Lots of places only allow the authenticator to be on one device. If I change my personal device then I no longer have access to the authenticator, and also a safeguarding issue to get personal device out in front of kids, which means I can't use e.g. edexcel with my GCSE class if I want to show them something.
• being able to take photos of work, or students (with consent) of clubs or trips for the school SM and the various events we use these pictures for.

And you say urgent support as to why SLT needs one, well what about if a teacher needs urgent support? Teams requires someone else in front of their PC to monitor if there is a medical emergency or if a kid needs removing etc. It could save on paper as notes passed through reception could be sent as a text message. It can also mean staff don't need to set up their emails on their personal phones, which will support with staff welfare.

Unless there's some massive drip feed like the academy are looking at redundancies and don't actually have the funds, this doesn't sound like a bad idea and your attitude comes off a little bit as the teachers not having anything important to do...unlike slt.

I must add...there is always a group who never have their phone charged, have left it at home, have it switched off, have broken it, have dropped it down the toilet. too busy to respond...
From experience the characters will be the characters phone or no phone.

I would love a work mobile phone.

I have had to download multiple apps onto my personal phone for 2-factor authentication to access the different things needed to do my job. I didn't have the memory/storage space on my personal phone so my bursars solution was delete my own apps and my photos and videos!!!!!! And the bursary couldn't understand why I would have a problem with this.

I had to allow another app with permissions to access my device.

Such an invasion of privacy.

A work mobile phone should be provided for these things imo if it is such a requirement that I cannot do my job without it.