Group of 17 London secondary schools join up to go smartphone-free | Hacker News Reader

Group of 17 London secondary schools join up to go smartphone-free

theguardian.com

115 pointskepler471187 comments

I think many of the comments in opposition to this are coming from people that do not have children. Many of those in support do. I speak as a parent of a child, and I think “parent brain” will affect your thoughts on this. Having said that, I grew up on dial up and very low tech HTML. Not social media which is an entirely different beast.

There is a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. NYU Prof. Jonathan Haidt argues that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting have led to a "rewiring" of childhood and a rise in mental illness. Suicides for both teenage girls and boys are up.

I’m choosing to send my kids to a school whose parents have also agreed to remove or drastically curb the use of social media. Not eliminate the creative sense of electronic tinkering.

I think it comes from the "I tinkered with tech as a kid!" mindset. It ignores the fact that smartphones are about as low-friction and consumption-centric as it gets when it comes to distracting material. If you want kids to learn about tech, then do it in a higher-friction deliberate context like a desktop computer.

Totally agree. I regularly hear that students should use tablets at school as it gets them used to technology they will use in the workplace. This is technology designed to be easy enough for an 80 year old to pick up and use, no training is required! Much better to be teaching them real work based activity & creative problem solving.

I’m a parent. My kids are not getting smart phones for as long as I can reasonably demand it. I foresee this going into secondary school age.

As a father of a 4 year old boy, I plan to remove smart phones and pads from my son for as long as possible. He can watch TV or play console/PC games but absolutely no mobile games for as long as I can. He will get a dumbphone maybe with a snake game when he grows up a bit.

In the mean time, I'll try to bring him to hiking, camping and other outdoor activities. If he is very into electronics then I'll introduce gaming and programming.

I'm also considering a no smartphone policy for myself. I cannot persuade my wife who is deep into scrolling hell already, sadly.

> I plan to remove smart phones and pads from my son for as long as possible.

It seems that once you send the kids to school, you no longer have full control over these things.

The friction is too big if you're the only parent with this policy. That's why "multiple schools join up" is a good thing.

Educational dos games. You can't beat them.

Where they're at an age before knowing FPS, MMOs they will have tons of fun jumping up and collecting words.

Word Rescue, Maths Rescue the Fun School series all hold weight to name a few.

Just because the old don't have hyper-ai-raytracing graphics doesn't mean they're not playable for the younger generations.

I've started introducing retro handhelds that can emulate most older console games to my kids.

They really like games like Tetris, Pokemon and Zelda.

It's fantastic.

That's something I have in mind. Is 6 years old a good age? My father exposed me to games like Alley cat and Bigtop when I was 6/7. He gave me 30 mins every weekend day. I might do the same to my son when he reaches 6.

Isn't banning smartphones rather an example of overprotective parenting?

No, it is protecting them from 100's of PhDs spending their days optimizing their apps/websites for addiction[0].

This what I explain to our kids and they understand it very well.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39987490

Where is the boundary between appropriately protective parenting and overprotective parenting?

It’s a boundary set by childless internet commenters.

IMO the problem with that argument is similar to the problem with arguing stopping the kids from touching a whirling sawblade is overprotective - you can let them learn that way, but there is a nontrivial chance they will suffer extreme lasting harm before learning their mistake, so the calculus becomes avoiding the cases where the probability of irrevocable harm is significant.

I'm all in favor of letting kids make mistakes rather than trying to stop them from doing everything, and that past a certain point, your attempts to filter what they consume are doomed in most environments.

But to the best of my ability to judge, not exposing children to unfiltered 0-friction instant gratification for some number of years is going to be somewhat practically necessary to allow them to develop enough experience with longer-term reward seeking to make such decisions based on actual information about the rewards versus just picking the easy button every time.

Otherwise, we've all seen the portrayals for many centuries before cell phones of what happens when you have people who have never had to do long-term planning for significant rewards, and are bored of the lack of texture in just taking the easy hit every time. Cell phones have just commoditized failing the marshmellow experiment.

Everyone’s definition of overprotective parenting is different. But we do know the harms of smartphones. Many of us have decided to curb it as much as we can, just as we want to mitigate pre-adult drinking and marijuana consumption (or at least demonstrate an environment that produces the least harms).

For me I don’t mind her running around in a forest school or climbing on trees. Modern playgrounds are surprisingly sterile and overly safe.

it sounds to me like you are describing overprotective parenting

Haidt is a reactionary who makes grandiose conjectures about the Kids These Days with little real scientific evidence to back them up. He's the same guy who threw a fit over safe spaces in colleges and made them out to be a way bigger deal than the were/are.

40% of the book is references. That doesn't seem like "little real scientific evidence".

He can be reactionary, and I don't agree with all of his views. But he is spot on about the negtive effect of smartphones and social media.

> But he is spot on about the negtive effect of smartphones and social media.

According to this article, he's not. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coddling-of-the-american-p...

At least you have a choice. Other parents have little choice but to send their kids to the same school as everyone else in the neighbourhood. London-based academies are not going to be as exclusive as independent (private) schools.

I’m grateful I have that choice to send her to a Waldorf school and I want more parents to have more options.

I believe it is Haidt himself who said bringing phones is analogous to a kid in the 90s bringing in a portable TV and putting on a show during class, and no one thinking that it is out of place. Of course it is! As a society we've made the determination that personal TVs and music players are unacceptable in the classroom, but phones, the single most addictive device ever made, is OK?!

My oldest is only 7 right now but I'm also seriously considering middle and high school options for him that severely restrict phone use. We play Minecraft on the weekends, he does MakeCode Arcade coding tutorials, and occasionally gets (heavily supervised) YouTube time. I don't think he's missing out on opportunities to become skilled with computers.

100% agree. My daughter's school in Blackheath has special Faraday cage pouches for each student. Children deposit their phones in their pouches and upon crossing the school gate the pouches get magnetically sealed until the student leaves school for the day. Parents are loving it.

We have schools doing this in the Netherlands. Students actually report liking it because they are now more in real physical contact with their fellow students directly instead of immersed in their phone every chance they get.

I think that shows that indeed it should be a rule, voluntary will not work because of something akin to the network effect.

When we get interns at our company many of them, instead of communicating with us are in their phones during lunch and coffee breaks. It’s a disease, they don’t integrate, they don’t learn being social around collegeas. I don’t like most people of that generation and they never get to know me. Something has to change.

It will change the same way it changed for the generations before you. The old guard will retire and the young will become old. It's the circle of life.

> something akin to the network effect

Yes. Kids are tuned in to the negative effect of phones/social media on themselves, don't want them, but feel they can't not have them because … everyone else is on them.

This is more about social media, but a research report [1] quoted by Jonathan Haidt in conversation with Tyler Cowen [2] expresses this:

"Users would need to BE PAID $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts."

BUT

"Users would be willing to PAY $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively."

Emphasis mine on the above two quotes.

[1] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-produ... [2] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-a...

> Students actually report liking it because they are now more in real physical contact with their fellow students directly instead of immersed in their phone every chance they get.

I wonder what a poll of those students would actually show

My son (15 in London) has moved schools more than I'd like and they've all had smartphone policies that ranged from "must be in your bag", via "must be in your locker", to "must be left at home". None have allowed phones to be out during school hours, or on school grounds, other than in very limited circumstances, generally with prior permission, so I'm more surprised that so many schools, apparently all in Southwark, were this lenient to start with.

The one school my son went to that had a "must be left at home" policy, I think went slightly too far (many students there had a complex travel route, and parents wanted to be able to check in if e.g. they were running late), but at the other ones having them lock it in a locker or hand it in at the door didn't see to be an issue for either the students or parents, nor did many students seem to want to risk detention for taking their phone out of the bag without good reason at the school were that was policy.

> parents wanted to be able to check in if e.g. they were running late)

this one is just so funny to me. dumbphone argument aside, what do these parents think happened when they, themselves, were running late from school? somehow, their parents managed without a direct, 24/7 line.

teenagers back then were more likely to have a car in the US, so they could get themselves home.

not so today in suburbia

I agree to an extent, and found it idiotic how strict they were about kids being accompanied to/from his primary school for that matter. But that secondary school was in an area where even I was skeptical about having him have no way of getting hold of us, not so much for safety, as because it'd take fairly little disruption for it to get complicated for him to make his way home in a reasonable time due to odd bus routes. And some kids have health issues - e.g. my son has struggled with various issues with his knees - where you don't want them facing a 1.5h-2h walk home if busses are messed up etc.

What was the impetus for schools to become "smartphone-friendly"? In the 00s, phones/smartphones in class weren't a thing.

Getting caught using one (at least with stricter teachers) meant it was taken from you and you got it back at the end of class or even better, your parents picked it up from the principal. YMMV, but that's how it was in Poland in 2005.

I suspect they first became mobile phone friendly. Dumbphones provided kids a way to communicate with parents and the worst distraction would be kids wanting to play snake and/or texting little messages to each other on their T9 keyboards.

But once smartphones came around they replaced those dumbphones and snuck in through the same policies, but in reality they're a completely different category from dumbphones.

Dumbphones weren't allowed in my high school, but apparently smartphones are now.

Our society isn't equipped to handle new developments like this, and they "just happen" before anyone gives much thought to whether they will lead to bad outcomes down the road.

When an immigrant who was handcuffed and tazed subsequently died in Canada, the investigation started asking questions about the use of tazers. They wanted to see the testing and data that showed they were not lethal or long-term harmful for use on humans.

It turns out no such testing had ever been done. Companies just started making them, so Police forces started buying them and using them on people. To this day there is no data about the consequences of using them.

Same thing for smartphones in schools and a TON of other things in our world.

Nonsense. I was in my teens when children getting cell phones was barely a thing, but there were already things like pagers and Gameboy and PDAs.

None of those things were allowed out of your locker from the moment you got to school until you left.

Children having smartphones in class is a significant deviation from the norm.

yeah I am similarly confused - i went to school in 2016, firmly the smartphone era - and phones would absolutely be confiscated on sight

By 2019 at my high school those rules were in place but not enforced.

Tech evangelists/EdTech salespeople saying that it was the future; there's been a big push in recent years.

From TFA:

> The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.

In my experience as a parent, this is nothing new. Until last year one of my children went to a very large secondary school in the UK (not in London though). The above was the rule for all of the seven years they were at the school: if you kept your phone out of sight and set to dnd then you were ok, but if it was visible then it was confiscated. My impression as a parent is that it was reasonably well observed by students and enforced by staff.

Context: We have an election here in the UK in ~2 weeks and phones in schools have been a minor moral panic issue that some of the parties are trying to use to assert their education credentials. I'm not saying there is no problem with children and phones - I believe there is - but theres a reason its getting attention at the moment.

Yeah, same for me. I think my sons primary school had a policy of no phones, but they also had a (and this I find more ridiculous) policy of kids being dropped off or picked up, so there was no argument of them needing it to get in touch with their parents. He joined an early intake at a secondary and there they had to keep it out of sight. His subsequent schools have required them to be in lockers or out of sight on school grounds or not brought to school at all. He's been to more schools than I wish he'd needed to, and at 15 he's never been to a school (in London) where he was allowed to bring phones out other than with permission (e.g. asking a teacher for permission to call a parent, or if specific tasks were set - rarely - during lessons).

As I said in another comment, I'm more surprised Southwark had this many schools without restrictions, unless this has been exaggerated and many of them already had restrictions anyway and so no reason not to sign up to this...

I was curious about the legal grounds that schools have to confiscate student's phones for up to a week, and I found this document from the UK government:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/62d1643e8fa8f...

Some things that concern me:

- Page 19: Staff may examine any data or files on an electronic device they have confiscated as a result of a search, as defined in paragraph 57, if there is good reason to do so.

- Page 20: In determining whether there is a ‘good reason’ to examine the data or files, the member of staff should reasonably suspect that the data or file on the device has been, or could be used, to cause harm, undermine the safe environment of the school and disrupt teaching, or be used to commit an offence.

It also doesn't seem to lay out a limit on the duration for which a device can be confiscated - which makes confiscation for a week look a bit like a grey area to me. Would love to hear from anyone with more experience on this area.

As long as the phone is locked, surely mere teachers can't force a student to unlock it.

That an official government document explicitly mentioning that school staff is allowed to search a device without law enforcement (either being present, or authorized by warrant) is problematic in and of itself.

You can decline this at any age. What can they do? Well turns out at that point they can only threaten to or apply violence or confiscate it until you hand over the details, none of which are "reasonable in all circumstances" as quoted in the legislation.

So the correct answer is to tell your kids to tell them to get fucked and call you. At that point, remind them that the device is your property, decline their request and they can only threaten you, which is 100% illegal.

I am more worried about the teachers from experience than the other students. Some of them I have encountered over the last 15 years of having three kids at school have been right nasty pieces of work and should not be in a position to have power over a minor.

but why? if im a teacher getting wind of cyberbullying, or a photo being shared, what should i do? call the police every time?

im telling you, the police will not like that policy any more than the students.

you're in a school. you don't have the right to do whatever you please.

I agree that teachers should be able to enforce discipline in schools.

With that said, I've got no idea what schools should do about things like sexting.

If I was a teacher and I confiscated a phone which might have illegal photos of underage students on it, I wouldn't want to turn a blind eye to that. But I also sure as hell wouldn't want to search it myself. I'd want that done by someone of unimpeachable character.

One of my sons schools had a case where someone was suspected, and from my understanding the school spoke to the police about it, and given the lack of any concrete evidence against one specific they, opted to send out a school-wide e-mail encouraging parents to talk to their kids and check their phone instead. Not a funny e-mail to get but frankly I'd rather that than find a random teacher had been tasked with it on the basis of suspicion that someone in school had been spreading something.

of course, in case of explicit images, i 100% agree. escalated straight to head of the school/department, who is detached from the situation and has a process to follow (presumably involving authorities)

I disagree. You don't need a warrant to search your child's phone as a parent.

Teachers have many of the same powers over children that their parents do. Power to detain, to punish, and yes to search.

If you're not happy with that as a parent then you can home educate them instead.

I disagree. Teachers don't have those powers unless parents explicitly opt in.

Also, your argument is pretty much "if you don't like it just leave". Which is one of the worst arguments for pretty much anything.

The school has broad powers to regulate student behaviour. Part 7 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006.

Link:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/40/part/7/chapter/...

I've seen this before. To quote a barrister friend of mine, regardless of the law, it mostly depends on how big a stick the person having their device confiscated wields. The stick in this case is connections, parents etc. They rely purely on submission to enforce this policy. A simple "no" removes consent and their ability to do anything about it. If after that it is forced upon you, then things get "interesting" to quote him because it depends how they try and enforce it.

For example the barrister friend in question's daughter had her phone confiscated and it went missing in custody of the staff. The school disclaimed all responsibility but paid the moneyclaim out for a new phone quietly when the relevant stick was wielded and removed their policy of confiscation immediately as they worked out it was a liability. Turns out that while the law says they can do this, it doesn't mention anything about having no duty of care of other people's property at the same time...

During my school years, my teacher confiscated a deck of my trading cards and stored them in the classroom drawer.

You could probably see where this goes next - very quickly all my cards were stolen by my classmates, and I could do nothing while I saw my classmates play my own cards, as I had no proof they were mine.

That certainly taught me a lesson or two about human nature, at least at that time...

Similar thing happened to me in the 80s.

I learned never to take anything of value into school.

My kids learned the same thing in the same way.

I am curious whether you are a UK citizen? In general, British law does not protect privacy, and is far less liberal (in the classical sense) than outsiders expect. The bits you cite seem fairly typical for UK expectations and rights.

I believe that, in retrospect, these schoolchildren will greatly appreciate this decision.

I can see it going either way.

A century ago in the US, a lot of support for Prohibition came from the impact of liquor, yet Prohibition itself also banned beer.

I can very easily believe that the backlash against dark patterns, against deliberately addictive apps (games and social media), against advertising getting squeezed into what would otherwise be normal conversations, against the surveillance that currently manifests as GDPR cookie popups because almost everyone both corporate and government would rather annoy people than stop snooping, may well lead to a new Prohibition on all such things.

But will this new Prohibition throw out the baby with the bathwater? Smartphones do a lot of genuinely useful things.

what useful thing does a smartphone do during school hours?

Looking stuff up during lunch or study hall. School hours != in class but it often means doing assignments.

Lunch time is supposed to be a break from studying.

(Study haul? I don't know this term.)

I'm assuming voice entry mistranscription of "study hall"?

Auto corrupt of study hall, also known as a free period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_hall

That would be very unusual until the final two years of school in England.

As a predefined period sure, but I assume kids in crutches still skip PE and whatnot, though you might be calling it something else.

Whatever you call a disruption in normal education such as when a teacher gets in a car accident on the way to work and suddenly there’s a non educational period for kids.

> Whatever you call a disruption in normal education such as when a teacher gets in a car accident on the way to work and suddenly there’s a non educational period for kids.

Supply teacher. No idea how the details were worked out, but there was always a substitute if the usual was unavailable for whatever reason.

The school's own teachers would cover for an injured colleague in an emergency like this. The lesson timetable will be written to ensure there's always some teachers free.

Given more notice, the school phones supply teachers (or an agency for them). Some of these teachers will expect to be ready to get to a school with very little notice.

In the worst case, where the cover teacher has not had chance to discuss what lesson is needed, they're going to say "let's go through the last chapter in the textbook" rather than "I give up, fiddle on your phones".

I only saw them in A levels, not during my GCSEs.

But the GCSEs were September 1998 to June 2000, and the UK government loves to fiddle with education, so I wouldn't be shocked if you told me that had changed.

They pretty much all have chromebooks or laptops these days that can perform the same actions if it's school related.

Also, study hall is an elective class. You still need to behave in study hall. The purpose is to study. Lunch could be an exception, but not really. There should be enough time to eat and socialize just a little. The lunch periods are not excessively long.

Try to juggle a Chromebook, textbook, and a worksheet on a one of those single seat desks and see if you start reaching for a phone.

Chromebook’s still aren’t nearly as integrated into schools as you might expect.

Then maybe the good answer is to fix the facilities.

Depends on the schools. There are many that don't issue physical text books, or rarely do. But that's really not any different from my college experience (with a larger laptop no less). Also, if you are using the textbook and worksheet, you really shouldn't need anything else.

Lunch is a good time to disconnect. I think teaching kids to having moments where they can just enjoy company and socialize is a good thing. Same reason we have a no screen policy during dinner time at home.

Most study hall / libraries have a number of computer terminals.

Most kids on most days do use it to disconnect, but conversely most kids also use it to do an assessment or study for a test at some point.

Dumb phone things, apps for blood sugar monitoring, checking public transport delays,....

There are enough stories about children dying because schools locked away medication. I have very little trust that schools will apply any common sense.

All the things you mentioned were normally handled without phones a generation ago. They should be able to get medical exceptions for medical devices.

Yeah, schools have a history of issues. However, this policy isn't really new. It was in place when I went to school and there were no issues.

> They should be able to get medical exceptions for medical devices.

Keyword "should".

> The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.

Yep, the "easy" and extremely irresponsible solution.

> It was in place when I went to school and there were no issues.

Good for you, but

https://www.9news.com.au/health/boy-dies-after-school-confis...

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/20/califor...

We're talking about phones, not lifesaving medication.

Exactly, schools even get things horribly wrong when it is literally life or death. How much more wrong do they get if the stakes are lower?

Leave it to the parents not the schools!

All the same things as internet connected computers in general — world's information at your fingertips, quiz apps to reduce the delay between doing a test and finding out what you need to focus on, etc. — except easier to take on field trips and hook up with heart rate monitors during PE.

What useful things could a smartphone do during school hours.

You have a literal internet connected computer with any function you could care to name, interactive touch screen display, full sound with headphones being provided by the student.

The situation we have now is that there are few apps that are suitable for a classrooms, even fewer which teachers would be allowed to use and none which are endorsed or included in the curriculum[1].

Meanwhile students phones have no central management unless by parents using a specialist app, are not automatically locked down to appropriate use during school hours, meaning they just get used for messaging and inappropriate stuff.

There is no reason that a students phone couldn't become the world's most amazing educational tool the moment they walk onto school premises - the world just hasn't caught up yet and probably won't for a while.

[1] I don't know this, but I'm sure they're providing iPads or something if they're actually doing anything around this.

with [1], you already said it. iPads serve that function. Have these really improved classroom education, or is it just a more convoluted, fidgety way to get through the materials?

> There is no reason that a students phone couldn't become the world's most amazing educational too

Or, some new, advanced technology exists, therefore, because it is new and advanced, it needs to be applied. This is an affliction.

I think my broader point is that whatever technology has been adopted hasn't had a noticeable effect and that's due to the usage, attitude and hence supporting infrastructure to adopt them.

GP asked what use a smartphone would have, implying that it could only ever be bad. I'm just arguing that this isn't necessarily the case, not that we should adopt it or even that adoption is likely.

Fair enough, I follow. but we've had about 20 years now, and it doesn't seem like any improvements have materialized, if anything, there's only negatives with kids being on their phones during school time. it's ok to axe to put this one on the loss pile, and move on.

Do you have kids? I have a 4-year old girl. And while parenting is so much harder without iPad and iPhone, my daughter is genuinely more interested in the world and imagination play than looking at screens. At age 2, was curious about the other kids with iPads, but now she shows no interest in screens. And we’re doing fine with static or minimally electronic toys. She has a whole adolescent/adult life ahead of her of screens.

This is about a developing child’s mind and the precautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that social media is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to adolescent girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.

Good for you, and good for her.

I wish I had kids, but sadly not yet.

Myself, I grew up with a Commodore 64, whose user manual didn't only teach me to code, but was even part of me learning to read.

But everyone is different, what worked fine for me isn't necessarily even a good idea for others.

> This is about a developing child’s mind and the cautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that it is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.

Sounds like you agree with me that much of the current stuff is bad. I'm saying that some of the rest is both harmless and helpful.

I had a computer growing up. It wasn’t always connected to the Internet. I had dial up occasionally. But I cannot imagine my child growing up with social media is a good thing. Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, TikTok didn’t exist when I was a kid.

And while the genie is out of the bottle, I want to minimize the exposure of social media. The smartphone experience is shrouded in social media. I want to do everything in my power to put her in an environment with other parents who have agreed to modify their environment. We’re looking at San Francisco Waldorf School. They even have a “computer lab” with designated screen time in the later grades.

> I want to minimize the exposure of social media

There's a reason I was comparing social media to hard liquor (and, if you read between the lines, gambling) — we are basically agreed on the harms side of the equation :)

Right, as they get a bit older, a wholesale screen ban is generally not the answer, we have a ban on consumption-oriented devices, but they have free rein to a raspi 400 with raspbian on it, and kidpix+dosbox/tuxpaint/scratch/other creative software.

Something like a c64 would be even better.

There are so many ways to teach kids to code and read that a smartphone/tablet is totally unnecessary. I refuse to believe for a second that my kids are at any disadvantage for not having screen time at home.

This doesn't sound particularly analogous to Prohibition. Mobile computers are being banned from schools, not from everywhere. As far as I'm aware, liquor and beer are also banned from schools and presumably always have been, before, during, and after Prohibition.

I was trying to suggest that at least some of these things will be banned everywhere, not that they have already been. Small scale prohibitions happened well before there was enough drive for the 18th Amendment to be proposed.

I'm not even sure the detail — will it look like a Butlerian Jihad on all tech because AI is everywhere and enough people hate that, or "just" a ban on all social media (including this website) — but the vibes have been brewing for a while now, and it could well take the shape of smartphones being wound back to 8310s.

> As far as I'm aware, liquor and beer are also banned from schools and presumably always have been, before, during, and after Prohibition.

So it's fine for the analogy that phones might get banned from schools before some kind of larger social rejection on par with the example I gave, yes?

To me, the necessity to have a banning "law" is a sign of failure. We should teach children the why and how, incentive them to put, by themselves, their phone in a lockbox and eventually consider them as growing adult and not irresponsible childs.

let's keep all the junk foods in schools too. children should be responsible enough to choose the fruit salad over the battered fries

You're assuming children (on average) have the same capacity to make reasoned decisions as adults so long as you just "teach" them.

There's a reason why we don't let 8-year-olds drive, and its not just that nobody bothered to take the time to teach them.

And no, no matter how many times I tell my three-year-old the stove is hot, I'm not going to put them in charge of cooking dinner on the stove. Instead, I'll ban them from using the stove outside of extremely supervised limited circumstances. I'm also not going to put them in charge of chopping things with sharp knives either. Instead I'll find other more age-appropriate ways for them to participate in making the meal.

We're talking about childrens that have between 11-18 years old.

I'm also not saying that teachers could ask nicely and then do nothing if the rule is broken. Actually, one could ask students to either put their phones in their bag or in a "safe phone-box", and still seize the phone if it's used.

Bringing awarness is important, when it comes to fighting addiction.

UK Secondary education is 11-15. UK driving age is 17. My argument about not letting them drive still stands. We're not letting 11-year-olds drive.

> I'm also not saying that teachers could ask nicely and then do nothing if the rule is broken.

But what rule? Clearly not some rule banning them, since your argument is there shouldn't be a rule banning their use. If the rule isn't a ban, then what cause does the teacher have to forcibly remove the phone? Is the student allowed to have the phone or not? It would seem like the idea a teacher is able to make the judgement call of policing the phone usage in the classroom and deciding when it becomes a distraction isn't working. And having it hidden behind a vague "causing a distraction" often can't easily be proven other than the teacher's judgement.

The teacher shouldn't have to deal with supporting their decisions of removing the phone they should be focused on teaching the lesson. Having a clear-cut rule that phones are not to be out in the classroom makes it obvious where the line is. If it is just at the teacher's discretion of what is a distraction, students (who are children and already often have a hard time with decision making abilities) would probably have a harder time understanding the edges of the judgement decision.

Sure seems like the simpler solution is to just have a blanket "phones aren't allowed" rule instead of the mess it is currently. No judgement call, no forcing the teacher to defend their position, the standards are clear from the start. Back when I was in school, about the time the iPhone came out, cellphones were common for highschoolers (age 13-18) but having them out in a classroom was strictly banned. If a teacher caught any student using a phone without previously having the teacher's permission, it would immediately be taken up and brought to the office and only released at the end of school. This seems entirely in-line with the program being implemented here.

> The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.

"Here, kiddo. You're on your own, against the trillion dollar companies who employ entire teams of psychologists to identify and exploit addiction mechanisms."

Most adults wouldn't wear seatbelt nor would they respect the gazillions of traffic laws that make the road safer for the drivers and the pedestrian if it wasn't mandatory.

Same for fire hazard in buildings or strict hygiene rules in hospital to avoid infections.

And thousands of laws that make people behave in general. Like prohibiting murder.

How many children do you have, what ages, and how’s your method going?

As reported by my son who is in a 'phone free' high school here in the US, the policy is entirely useless. They make them put their phones in the 'phone hotel' at the beginning of the day, and they can retrieve them at the end. But many kids just put an old decoy phone in the hotel and keep their actual phone with them. Even if they don't do this, they're required to use laptops for class, and even with the school attempting to lock the laptops down, the kids all know how to get access to messaging, games, video, and social media on them. So they can do everything they would do with their phones anyway.

Ironically, I think that circumventing lockdowns will teach them far more about technology than the policy to use them for class in the first place.

are you sure the damage is the same?

it sounds like because they have access to a school laptop, you're assuming the consequences of smartphone usage will still apply. what are the odds that the impact is actually identical? it's almost certainly not. and if i had to put money on it, i would say the impact is significantly reduced.

still there, sure, but this is a spectrum

Denver School(s) of Science and Technology (DSST) have been mobile free for a long time. The kids, I am told, love it. These are public schools. Confiscated phones are required to be picked up in person by the guardian. Something that can be quite the trek and traffic fight. I am told repeat offenses are not common.

Denver's public school system (DPS) is a bit unique, just FYI. All public schools are chartered, including the DSSTs. Meaning that all guardians are required to select the school that they want their kids to go to, there are no defaults. All kids get free bus passes on municipal transport. As is usual in Colorado public schooling, things get really law-y as the city and school district lines cross over county lines (cities are not entirely within counties in CO).

https://www.dsstpublicschools.org/dsst-cgms-family-handbook

My kids' school district with 10k students has a no phones policy. Kids have to check them at the door, if they bring them.

https://berkeleyhighjacket.com/2023/news/bhs-teachers-unify-...

My school had a no phones policy. Once I brought about five different phones, and each time they took one I would pull out another.

Source: I am a parent of child who has just finished GCSEs. We live in the London commuter belt.

The hope that stopping phones in school will help the mental health issues that children are facing today is a ridiculous hallucination. The second paragraph of the article states "in the hope of also addressing the downsides of their use outside the school gates". Hoping for a better result is not enough.

Phones enable a level of socialisation, both positive and negative, on a scale that people who finished school as recently as five years ago will not understand. My child is a product of the covid-taught secondary schoolers and has very complex relationships with communication technology.

It is not about the phones in school. It is about games, apps, social media, media, influencing, content creation, filters, pr0n, spam, bots, AI, news. Those same platforms and tools are used to bully, shame, abuse, and stalk. Whatsapp 'in' groups allow social inclusion and exclusion at a pace that would never have happened at the same rate as before. You can be in and out of a group in seconds. You can feel the pressure to have to 'engage' at 2am. The phones are the problem, but switching them off while at school will make no difference.

By all means, let those schools trial it and give us the data. Adjust the results levels of family income, ethnic background, previous mental-health issues. I doubt we will see a drop in cases of teenage depression, self-harm, and suicide.

The UK (and many other education systems) have a pattern of 'parental blame'. For many educators, if a child kicks off at school it is not because they are being bullied, but because their parents expose them to domestic violence. 'Phones off at school' makes all the phone-related problems the parents' fault. Forgetting, of course, that the phone is just a device that connects children to their school peers.

The Netherlands already banned smartphones from schools since January 1st 2024

https://www.iamexpat.nl/education/education-news/netherlands...

I know it would complicate things a lot, but are we sure it's smartphones and not social media / "not educational" websites being the issue?

If I had a phone with calendar and a to do list, when at school, I might have fared better.

A smartphone isn’t just a calendar and todo list. I don’t think even blocking just social media is enough in schools as the devices offer plenty of other distractions.

You're describing the improper use of any tool. I would have liked to bring a penknife to school to sharpen pencils, but it's probably good that they were banned.

Can we be sure it's social media at all? Or is it a behavior issue? Does it matter if they are watching tiktok or mucking with a calendar if they aren't participating in class?

Enforcement will likely come down to don't do stupid shit with your phone or risk losing it. Ignoring class for a phone is stupid shit regardless of what's on the screen.

Student planners are paper calendars and to do lists. One can have these things without a CPU, RAM, and a network connection.

There are enough offline alternative for that, including paper based. Although I keep telling her it can't possibly be good in the long term for her skin, my eldest daughter keeps writing her homework tasks on her skin.

I think you underestimate how attractive socializing with your friends is. My niece's school uses chromebooks and they spend a lot of time using google chat with eachother during class.

Vaguely related: A local theater is making sort of a big deal about sealing phones and smart watches into Yondr pouches for the performance unless you go to an area where phones are allowed. I don't really care but this seems to be a solution to a problem I really haven't observed when attending local theater.

We are limiting TV time to 30m per day and no pad/phone for our 4 year old kid.

IMO the issue is with the school, not us. Schools will inadvertently introduce pad as a learning device, and his friends will use such devices too. I hope they ban it in Canadian schools too.

Can the students use other computing devices like Chromebooks or iPads with restrictions in place? Overall, this is likely a success for the schools who can commit and the students willing to compromise.

We peaked at flip phones. I remember learning to type on a typewriter. It was really fun. I loved the internals.

Kids are missing out on the fun stuff and replacing it with phones. i hope we start to see change.

I was a student of one of these so called smartphone free schools and I used my smartphone during class time. Just because it was banned. So I highly doubt this'll work.

I am suprised they allowed them at first to begin with.

Listening to something on the BBC the other day that I found thought provoking.

The speaker suggested that the question’at what age do you give your child access to the internet’ could better be framed ‘at what age do you want to give internet companies access to your child’

I genuinely think there's a difference between young people having access to the internet, and young people having access to social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

Social media is designed to be addictive. Much of the internet is not. I'm increasingly in favor of banning Facebook and Instagram to under 18s.

under 18s arent on facebook, and barely on instagram. that might work for 25-40 year olds though

Replace with TikTok or Snapchat or whatever they are using. Because they are definitely using social media. Maybe you’re playing gotcha at a poor millenial’s out of date examples but the point stands.

Source: parent of high schooler.

+ discord. 90%+ of my sons social media use is private discord servers.

The little familiarity I have with discord makes me think maybe it’s not quite as bad? More like IRC with a more modern interface, and not as much designed to be a total time and attention sink? Would be curious about others’ takes.

I get kids may still spend a lot of time talking to people in there but how different is that from when my sister spent all her free time talking to friends on the phone as a teenager…

Well. That depends on who are on a given server. Having multiple friends spamming with calls can be disruptive, and convincing them it's ok to turn off notifications is hard because many of them seem to worry they'll be excluded from the group etc. if they're not involved, and sometimes they do egg each other on with respect to misbehavior.

I'm not generally all that negative to social media as long as they know how to deal with it, and Discord is probably towards the better end, especially if your kid has some self-discipline about which servers they join, but it can be nearly as bad.

Put another way: If your kid hangs out with the "good" kids, it's probably fine, ranging to good. E.g. my son started spontaneously cleaning his room today because one of his friends had ribbed him about needing it. But if your kid hangs out with the "bad" kids, Discord provides an easy way for them to do that without it being obviously visible to you, so it needs you to keep an eye out.

I think the fact that it's so easy for it to fly under the radar is the biggest problem.

There just isn’t much of the internet left outside of social media as far as I can tell

That's just not true though, however much it may seem like it.

sounds like you’ve been captured and are now projecting that onto kids

that was not the choice at all for me as a child

> The speaker suggested that the question’at what age do you give your child access to the internet’

Australia has also banned smart phones from schools. Here the ban had nothing do to with access to the internet or the effects of social media.

To paraphrase your question: at what age does constantly accessing the internet not interfere with work or schooling?

The answer is never, of course. All workplaces have policies limiting it. Schools have the same problem: there were always kids using phones hidden under desks to send message to each other. Workplaces enforcing their internet policies using monitoring software is rare thankfully, but expecting kids to exercise the same self discipline as a adult can is futile and so they moved to a ban. They ran studies on the outcome: https://theconversation.com/banning-mobile-phones-in-schools... TL;DR: Banning phones improved scholastic results.

I'd lay long odds the article is little more than click bait. My guess is a very well known result and the schools are actually banning phones so they can do their main job, which is teach kids. But rather than report that, the journo speculated in the most inflammatory way possible.

Sounds like commonsense to me. This was the policy when I went to school too - use a phone during school time and it's confiscated.

Overblown hysteria both makes school administrators feel useful and sells papers...

What does this need to be a collective action?

Why can't a school decide on their own?

This is great! The UK is showing great leadership in this.

This is plainly idiotic. Smartphones are great for having useful apps for studying such as dictionaries and translators, they provide access to Wikipedia and means to communicate with other kids. They also make parents feel less stressful knowing they can always call or message their kids. Whoever came up with this idea is a retrograde.

What kind of parent will call or message their kids during school hours?

All the ressources mentionned can probably be accessed through other means, usually the school library which has computer terminals.

it's incredibly common, like a quick text from the child "hey don't pick me up today I'm going to Greg's house" or a parent saying "do you have football practice today"

I am just waiting for my daughter to come back home to tell her whatever I need to (or leave a note on the kitchen counter) and she does the same. Also once home, she has access to me through XMPP even if I am not there.

How did people ever survive school 20 years without such an ability?

There is an easy solution that could be implemented. Kids can go to the office during lunch or a break and request their phone. They can send their message and then give back their phone.

20 years ago the chance that someone could steal or abuse a child on or from the way to school was way much higher. People have already started forgetting about it. No phone = no way to track back the criminal or the crime.

Kids should be able to get their phone back when they leave the school. This means if they are kidnapped, either a kidnapper went onto campus and kidnapped the kid or the kid left the campus without retrieving their phone. It also assumes the kidnapper would allow a victim to keep their phone, which would be quite the dumb decision.

None of this seems very likely...

Source of your data over 20 years?

If you look at nonfamily child abductions, most of them involve kids between 0 and 5. Also in a significant proportion of abduction, the kid is not even targeted as it involve parents leaving the kid in a car and the car is stolen.

why exclude family? that's the primary case is it not?

Because I guess a family abduction involve a good knowledge of the victim/behavior and I would guess the first thing the abductor would do is making sure he isn't tracked by getting rid of the phone and not using their own in a radius around the scene of the abduction.

Quite a different set of parameters than abductors targetting random kids in a gas station and driving away with the car.

Yeah that's what they used to do, go to the office and request to use the phone. If your parent wanted to tell you something they'd call the school and have them relay the message.

It's not a difficult problem to solve, but I guarantee there would be some parents fighting against it if implemented. Dealing with parents these days can sometimes be more difficult than their kids.

> What kind of parent will call or message their kids during school hours?

Both my teens text me throughout the school day if they need something. It's not every day, but it's several times a week. It's incredibly useful. I'd fight this vigorously if they tried this in my school district.

useful != essential

Any usefulness needs to be balanced with the possible detrimentals consequences.

Maybe you'd all learn to be a bit more organised.

we should let older high schoolers use phones during the school day. phone vocabulary apps were invaluable for my SAT prep. the library is frankly a laughable substitute

that said, they shouldn’t be allowed in actual class

No kid in the history of the world has ever used their phone in class to willingly use Wikipedia or a translator, stop this nonsense.

If the school wants to teach children how to use these tools, fine, but on devices that won't spy on them or allow them to destroy their brain on tiktok. They can do this at home.

My schooling experience (in London, less than 10 years ago) was a waste of time. If they want students to be engaged, make the material engaging.

As much as I agree, teachers aren't really paid well, don't regularly get any training to improve their teaching, and don't have time at the end of the day to make efforts to improve the next day.

Even the best teachers won't be engaging to some of their students.

My criticism is directed more at the exam boards and Department for Education. They're more concerned with creating hoop jumping/memorisation exercises than teaching logic or life skills.

Moreover, this system we have is at the detriment of boys' education. Many of those who misbehave or underperform because they don't want to sit at a desk all day are loaded up with ADHD drugs because it's a system that doesn't work for them. I don't have a link but government stats show clear underperformance among boys.

> Many of those who misbehave or underperform because they don't want to sit at a desk all day are loaded up with ADHD drugs because it's a system that doesn't work for them.

I was actually never loaded with ADHD drugs even though I turned out to have needed them. Nuts that it's given to people who might not need it, while people who do need it are overlooked.

Professor here (not UK-based nor K12)! I try my best to engage students with the material I create, but students must also have an inner motivation to learn (be it to have a better future, to create more opportunities for themselves, etc.).

Oh, I would also like to earn a little bit more, at least the same as a junior or mid-level developer! I have MSc students earning as much as me, with 1/10 of my experience (that's why I'm teaching them). I like to teach, but damn, I would like to be equally compensated! :)

It's a two-way street..

In many developing countries, students pay attention because they want to better themselves in life and they have been taught that working hard in school will get them out of poverty.

Meanwhile the Western countries are wondering why they are being eclipsed in academic performance.

Valuable and engaging are different things.

I found Duolingo was very engaging. I also found it wildly ineffective at actually teaching me more than the absolute basics of any languages… except Arabic where it didn't even manage that.

I'm struggling to imagine how bad a school in the UK would have to be to really be a complete waste of time. For example, there must be some use in learning basic mathematical concepts and having access to someone who can help you when you get stuck on them. If you were just a super bright kid who didn't need any support to learn that stuff then I can see more where you are coming from, but that obviously isn't the typical case.

> waste of time

Don't we all say that though?!? :) It's hard to measure the value if we can never try out the alternative and see where it would lead us.

I am not sure you can match social medias engineered for addictions.

Although, regardless of how engaging is the material, students will never know if they are already doom scrolling their phone even before the start of the class.

Why does all material have to be engaging? Can it all be as engaging to every student as what a smartphone offers? We already expect a lot of work from teachers, why do they also have to compete with the latest billion dollar game?

I agree. Kids gotta learn how to handle boredom and not be disruptive with their own thoughts. Doodle if you need to

I didn't need a phone to be distracted in class, or better yet, to cut class.

Sure, smartphones can be very distracting, more so than dumbphones, but there have been rules in place for phones in a classroom since the 2000s and kids would still sneak them in, this won't change kids sneaking in anything, nor does it change the fact that you weren't supposed to be on the phone in class in the first place (or that teachers can't police it or try to).

The main issue is underpaid, overworked, and more often than not, teachers who aren't properly qualified to teach (not for lack of an official paper saying they can), who can't reach troubled/lacking students, and quite frankly they don't care to or even attempt to.

Earlier today someone posted this article [1], I'd love to know out of those 72% who participated on the survey, how many are teachers that students can say: "Mrs. X is one of the best teachers I've ever had. She always makes the lessons interesting and goes out of her way to help us understand the material.", "Mr. X really cares about his students. He takes the time to get to know us and makes learning fun."

I'm sure a lot of you from the newer generations have experienced that moment where you turned to the internet to learn something from Youtube because the teacher in class couldn't be bothered to, or simply was inept at explaining it in a way that YOU could understand, but some random Indian guy on Youtube can. Not to say that the older generations didn't have similar experiences.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/12/72-percen...

PS: This isn't me saying that we should or shouldn't ban phone, (phones have been banned from classrooms since the start anyway), this is me saying that we have much bigger problems that are overshadowed by scapegoats which no one bothers to bring up.

Why is no one talking about the fact that so many school's infrastructure is so bad that it can potentially even be a risk to your child's health, physical and mental, I.E: extremely hot or cold classrooms, poor ventilation, the bathrooms being unsanitary, etc...

Why are kids 180cm+ sitting down on wooden chairs meant for kids with 40cm less?

Why are kids forced to carry 10kg+ worth of books on their back every morning, (which cost a fortune btw).

Why does no one talk about the food that's served to kids being terrible, not just unhealthy, but just horrible because they will hire the cheapest contract and purchase the cheapest ingredients, and often times quite unsanitary looking (if those kitchen's I grew up seeing were restaurants, I wouldn't eat there.)

What about staff who won't give a flying * about your 14 year old child smoking behind the school's building, or getting bullied right there in-front of everyone and the excuse is that they aren't paid well enough to care.

You can keep listing problems that honestly rank higher and contribute to your child's poor education more.

Sorry for the rant.

I think you are onto something. Cell phones appear to be just part of the issue. In the US ( I have no insight about UK ), it seems already existing rules are not always enforced.

<< The main issue is underpaid, overworked, and more often than not, teachers who aren't properly qualified to teach (not for lack of an official paper saying they can), who can't reach troubled/lacking students, and quite frankly they don't care to or even attempt to.

It is easy to paint with broad strokes. For example, in Chicagoland, teachers can be paid fairly well for the amount of work they do ( though based on some of the stories, I would not want to go through that myself; surely, some just check out ).

Of course, staff are not subject to this, because while evidently a deadly poison to the 16 year old brain, they become an essential professional tool as soon as you acquire your teaching loicense.

The cool / mischevious kids will still bring phones to school, while life of the calm kids will be made miserable.

Story old as time.

Fascinating that people here cant predict it.

you’re downvoted but this was my experience going to a school that “banned” smartphones

This is like someone suggesting murder should be illegal, and the main argument being “but some people will still do it anyway”.

Bringing a phone to school is murder? Before smartphones kids brought (comic) books and read them during lessons, or just looked through the window and daydreamed. Or they would write notes to each other. Is that murder too?

No, that’s not how analogies work.

Confiscating phones from children for an entire week is an unhinged idea. Confiscating for the rest of the school day I can understand, but not giving them the phone back when they go home is dangerous.

At some point a child will get abducted on their way home from school, or be unable to contact emergency services, because the school confiscated their phone.

They seem to want parents to buy dumb phones instead for their children. Can you imagine trying to text “I’m being followed by someone on XYZ road” on a Nokia-style keyboard? Do dumb phones support sending GPS coordinates to emergency services like smartphones do?

Even mundane things like what if a child’s train gets cancelled and they need to check Google Maps to find an alternative way home.

I don’t buy this argument at all, if someone is abducting children taking their phone away will be an absolutely trivial first step. I know this might shock you be there was a time before phones and everything was totally okay.

Typical fear mongering that got phones all over the schools in the first place. Kids aren't getting abducted or even using their phones in an emergency capacity.

Can you provide data that grounds these claims? How often are children saved from abduction by an iPhone or similar?

The schools posit that the social and educational benefits of no smartphones outweigh the (purported) risks of an un-nannied childhood.

The phone doesn't do anything against abduction. It doesn't make the public transports work better either.

Also, there is a thing about developing social skills to be able to do small things like asking for directions/help.

How on earth did any child survive pre 2000..

> Can you imagine trying to text “I’m being followed by someone on XYZ road” on a Nokia-style keyboard? Do dumb phones support sending GPS coordinates to emergency services like smartphones do?

what do you think the world looked like 15 years ago? the 1-week is a punitive punishment. you know you can't have this. you deliberately chose to use it. if you get it back at the end of the day, so what? you've lost nothing. you wouldn't have been able to use it during school anyway.

Taking people's property is not acceptable. Parents can confiscate phones if they want. Schools can suspend disruptive pupils.

The UK has no sense of personal autonomy. Culturally no limits on controlling people to suit authority preference.

if taking a student's phone breaches your idea of autonomy, it's not just the UK you will have a problem with.

why does a student have the right to bring a banned object to a class and keep it? you would instead suspend the student? who do you think prefers that to confiscation? the student? the parent? teacher?

The damage done to kids by smartphones greatly exceeds the safety benefits you describe IMHO. Your use of hyperbolic language like "unhinged" suggests you're addicted to your smartphone or at least you're in denial about the damage it did to you.

In the winter it’s common for kids to walk home from school after dark, if there are after-school activities. I did that many times as a kid and it was scary. I would have felt a lot better with a smartphone.

I’m a grown adult and I wouldn’t feel comfortable walking around London in the dark without a smartphone.

Taking a phone away from an 11 year old before they walk back home in the dark is unhinged, it’s not hyperbolic to say that or a sign of addiction.

>I’m a grown adult and I wouldn’t feel comfortable walking around London in the dark without a smartphone.

Can we talk about this for a minute? Suppose a big guy or a group of guys see you walking in London in the dark and decide to do you violence. What is the main way a smartphone can help you in your opinion? By giving you a chance to get photos of them? By helping you get emergency medical help after they beat you up?

I'm genuinely curious, not just trying to score points.

Is there some danger other than violence from strangers that you think the smartphone will help you with?

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