On why Mobile Phones have no place in Schools

Many of us of a certain vintage - dare I say those of us over 36 or so (?!) - will have gone through our school careers without that tiny little gadget in our pocket which permeates through the experiences of our children nowadays so drastically. I refer, of course, to the mobile phone. Was it just me, or did we seem to manage quite successfully without it in those days? School was school, and home was home. If you needed to contact your parent or guardian, you used the pay phone outside the school office. If your parent or guardian needed to contact you, they phoned the school and left a message. And that was that. Simple. No fuss. No drama.

Fast forward a few decades and it is a completely different scenario. Many of our children who are undergoing teenage life or who are on the cusp of adolescence will have grown up to a large extent with portable technology, and most will at some point before the age of 13 have received their first mobile phone. I even hear stories of toddlers as young as two being able to meander seamlessly around an I-Pad Screen with some independence. In fact, some weeks ago I went one Saturday morning to get my hair cut. Before me in the queue was a 4-5 year old boy, who sat the whole time glued to a game on his mother's mobile phone whilst waiting and whilst in the barber's chair - a combined total time of 45 minutes, by my reckoning. And I couldn't help but think that those 45 minutes had been wasted, as the child could have been reading an exciting and stimulating book instead of whizzing around some virtual race track or fighting some mythical monsters. Even modern prams, I'm led to believe, have special in-built pouches so that parents can view an I-Pad or other portable screen whilst pushing the pram. And again I wonder...is this really the sort of example we want young, fresh, new-born eyes to be witnessing? Because things are difficult enough getting the current adolescent generation to understand the pitfalls of technology, never mind the generation which is coming behind.

Don't get me wrong. Technology has its place. In my own school we increasingly set homework online. Not research, or so-called 'fact-finding', but rather self-quizzing homework which aims to assist the process of embedding knowledge acquired in class into long-term memory. Our Year 8 and 9 pupils use the IXL self-quizzing site for English and Maths, and Quizlet is increasingly used as a tool for retrieval practice and to ensure that children do not forget the knowledge which has been acquired in class. Such sites can be highly effective, as they give our students instant feedback, and also have the potential to reduce teacher marking workload through the fact that the online system adapts the level of difficulty according to the progress of the child and subsequently marks their efforts.

It is, however, the case that a sizeable number of our children are addicted to technology - and addicted to their phones. As a Principal, I see it. Children who - instead of enjoying screen-free sleep - are watching Netflix, YouTube and checking their Facebook pages until all hours of the morning, and then coming into school with no concentration. Children who have their phone beside them when they are doing homework, and get distracted away from that homework when it 'pings'. Children who eat or 'snack' their evening meals in a rush, watching the phone screen instead of interacting with family members, constantly flicking between Whatsapp Groups, Instagram, SnapChat, their most recent Fortnite game and other social media apps which more or less demand our young people to respond instantaneously to 'maintain their profile' or keep up with their peers. Is it any wonder, as Katharine Birbalsingh points out in her excellent article from March, that psychologists have been warning us about this for years: the mental health problems it causes, the loneliness, the breakdown in social skills and family communication, the inability to concentrate for more than 20 seconds. Not to mention what they are being exposed to.  Like Katharine's school, Michaela, my own school has also introduced a 'Family Lunch' for our new pupils, partly to ensure that they spend some time socialising around a dinner table and engaging in constructive conversation with their peers.

Again, like Katharine, I too assumed that Grand Theft Auto was a game about stealing cars. In fact, that game which - despite its 18 certification - is played by children much younger, actually includes other evils such as killing and prostitution. And as for Fortnite, the rather innocent-looking, cartoon-themed graphics almost covers up the fact that this is a game which seems to revolve around killing other people's virtual characters 'live' as they play.

It is no accident that the Chief Executives of big organisations, like Apple's Steve Jobs, refuse to give their children this technology. Steve Jobs, in fact, prefers to immerse his children in dinner time discussion and in activities which promote cultural capital - reading books, visiting museums, playing music. He knows what - deep down - I think many of us also know but are perhaps reluctant to say in a world which seems so fixated and in need of this technology - almost like a drug.

And this is the crux of the matter. Technology is addictive. And it has the potential to damage our children. When we were children, we may have watched TV serials or soap operas. Whilst these may not have always been highly productive, at least they had a narrative - a beginning, middle and end which we followed through. Often of course, the children's serials had a moral. I remember very well at Primary School, as an example, the large TV being rolled out from the store for us to watch BBC's 'Look and Read' Children's Series. Nowadays, children don't do that. Instead, they 'dip into' YouTube videos and other social media apps - with no narrative and no moral compass offered to them in the online world. It is rather ironic, as Miss Birbalsingh points out,  that pornographic magazines are banished to the top shelves of newsagents, and yet in the online world they are readily accessible to the children we are all trying to protect.

In my own school we have moved to tighten up our Mobile Phone Policy quite considerably. To be fair to the great pupils in my school, it was never really too much of an issue - until the rural area I worked in got 4G coverage just over a year ago, and we noticed an increase in the number of social media issues we were dealing with. The country of France has moved 'en masse' to ban mobile phones in schools. I totally agree. Whilst at my school we haven't adopted a stringent 'confiscated until the half-term' policy like some schools in England, we expect phones to be out of sight, invisible and switched off at all times whilst pupils are on the school premises, otherwise it is confiscated for a period of time.

Why? Because - quite simply - mobile phones are a dangerous distraction which really have no place in schools. The temptation for our pupils - if allowed phones - to be checking Facebook, Snapchat or other apps instead of socialising with their peers at break and lunch is too great for the majority of them to handle. It distracts from their learning, distracts from their communication skills and ultimately distracts from their childhood. We would be foolish to think that the vast majority of children are not spending much time on technology in the evenings, at weekends and during school holidays. School should be a protective sanctuary of routine for our children , free from the distractions and dangers of technology and the online world - a world made all the easier to access due to increasing network coverage and diminishing costs.

And that ease of access - and lessening costs of technology - has particular potent dangers for our poorest pupils. As Principal, I see it as my responsibility to work alongside parents to ensure that children understand the dangers of technology and how to stay safe online, but also to protect my pupils. It is my utter conviction that this is best achieved through a very robust and strict Mobile Phone policy which is ultimately destined to allow children to be children, to learn without distraction, to socialise without the pressures of the online world in their pockets and to be equal to their peers without having to compare their £50 phone with their mate's £700 I-Phone - which happens in schools where phones are allowed.

Whilst a strict Mobile Phone policy might not be to the liking of everyone, no school does it with the aim of making life difficult for people. It is done, purely, to protect our children in an increasingly pressurised and nefarious world.