Phone Free Schools
By Antonia Berry, Depute Rector (Academic)
It was just over ten years ago that mobile phones in the classroom became the next educational innovation – a way to make learning more engaging. Hundreds of schools jumped on the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) band wagon in an attempt to be ‘dynamic’ and ‘forward thinking’. After all, 88% of 11-year-olds in the UK now have a mobile phone . Overnight, young learners had access to limitless knowledge with one swipe of their screens. What an incredible resource for pupils to have at their fingertips, right?
It was just weeks into the new term at a school whose new BYOD policy was well under way, that I noticed a distinct shift in the staffroom. Teachers were struggling with discreet text messages shared between pupils during lessons, phones hidden behind pencil cases. Worst still, pictures and videos of teachers taken by pupils during class started appearing online.
Desperately strategies were shared: “phones should be face down on the desk”, “get them to hand their devices in on the way into the room”, “pupils need to keep their hands where you can see them at all times.” Faces of the Senior Management were strained as they balanced their time between regular duties and investigations of phone related incidents.
As quickly as phones appeared they became the greatest challenge for new and experienced teachers. That is not to say the challenge was insurmountable; I had colleagues who had mastered it. Experts in classroom management, who, through some dark art, had pupils using their phones as effective learning tools alone. But even these educational jedis could not extend their influence beyond the classroom door.
The breaks between lessons became unsupervised virtual spaces, and schools were faced with an explosion in cyber bullying incidents. Perceptibly, social skills declined, and concentration levels dwindled. The playground benches seated groups of silent teenagers, the crowns of their heads visible rather than their faces, as they stared at their handheld devices.
And now we have the evidence for what we have previously only anecdotally been able to assert. Misuse and overuse of phones has a detrimental effect on the mental health of children and young adults. The impact of phones on behaviour of pupils at school is so great that last year the Government proposed a ban of mobile phones in all classrooms in England. There was, of course, resistance to this kind of nationwide policy making. And they’re about ten years too late!
But they got one thing right; for many schools, for thousands of teachers, for tens of thousands of parents the mobile phone presents the greatest threat to the safe and healthy development of our young people. BYOD may once have felt like the brave step into the future, but it’s far braver to take a stance as a leader in education and declare your educational institution as a phone free space.
I am now the Deputy Head Academic at one such school – St Columba’s School in Kilmacolm, on the outskirts of Glasgow. There is no fudginess to our policy on mobile phones, no blurred lines. Between the hours of 8.40am and 3.40pm, pupils are not allowed to use their phones. If a pupil is caught with their phone during lunch or break it is a letter home and an automatic after school detention with a member of senior management. This zero-tolerance approach has resulted in a truly phone free educational space. Pupils socialise at lunchtime, attend any one of the 50 clubs on offer, play sports. Classrooms are spaces without distractions, where knowledge is shared, and curiosity stoked.
I, like the rest of the world, recognise the many benefits of smartphones and developing technology. But would I ever go back to a school where the light from a phone screen replaces the engaged face of a young person deep in discussion with a peer or a teacher? Not a chance.
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