The moral crusade against the smartphone in schools is a baffling phenomenon. The most recent is a request from our local MP Laura Trott for a nationwide ban.
Every few months, I encounter people deeply committed to the ‘anti-smartphone’ movement, convinced that they have uncovered some kind of shocking truth: allowing children access to a device capable of distraction, danger, and social complexity is a problem.
My confusion stems from the fact that virtually no one disagrees with the core principle: children should not have unfettered access to personal smartphones during the school day. The consensus among educators and parents is solid.
The real debate isn’t whether to manage phones; it’s whether a blanket, national prohibition is a genuine solution or merely a symbolic surrender that distracts from the deeper work of education.
The money-making machine
When you scratch beneath the surface of the moral panic, the whole endeavour starts to look less like a policy solution and more like a collective industry seeking to profit from parental and governmental anxiety.
If a school mandates a ‘phone-free’ environment, it needs a system. Enter the entrepreneurs. We are seeing an explosion of products like magnetic locking pouches and high-tech storage solutions – all designed to manage a problem that, arguably, schools could handle with existing disciplinary policies.
These companies have a powerful, vested interest in keeping the ‘ban them all’ narrative alive, as every new school represents a significant contract.
Schools, already on razor-thin budgets, are pressured into spending thousands on locking devices to enforce a rule that should be about expectation setting and conduct. The focus shifts from pedagogy to asset management.
The horse has already bolted
The ‘ban’ narrative also entirely ignores reality. Children already own and use smartphones. They are the primary tools of communication, organisation, and entertainment for most teenagers.
This leads to the most illogical parallel drawn by ban proponents: the ‘would you let your child smoke or drink alcohol?’ argument.
Of course not. But this analogy fails spectacularly. This is an exercise in false equivalence, designed to invoke maximum moral outrage, not reasoned debate. Alcohol and tobacco are substances with inherent, immediate, and unambiguous physical toxicity. A smartphone is a complex, essential tool for life outside the classroom.
Moreover, a ban simply drives the behaviour underground. Teenagers, particularly those predisposed to risk-taking, enjoy pushing boundaries. Prohibition merely makes monitoring and addressing the problem harder.
The lazy opt-out
Banning something is always the easiest, most expedient answer. It allows the institution to completely opt out of the messy, difficult, and profoundly important job of education. The push for a total ban is fundamentally lazy because it ignores the core responsibility of schooling in this age: digital literacy and digital citizenship.
We are educating children for a world where they will navigate social media, manage personal data, identify misinformation, and use mobile technology for work and communication.
If we ban the device entirely for seven formative years, we are sending them into the digital deep end without ever teaching them how to swim.
The challenging but necessary approach is to teach them proper use. This means explicit lessons on privacy settings, responsible digital communication, and how to put the phone away when focus is required.
It’s messy. It requires effort from teachers and parents. But it is the only responsible way forward. A ban is an admission of failure: a declaration that we, the adults, are incapable of teaching our children how to use a modern tool.
Imposing a sweeping, national legal mandate would create an administrative nightmare, diverting even more precious resources away from teaching and learning and toward enforcement, storage, and litigation.
Ultimately, the anti-smartphone crusade feels like a nostalgic yearning for a simpler time that never truly existed. The solution isn’t a ban that relieves us of our educational duty; it’s a commitment to effective, nuanced, and persistent teaching about responsibility in a digital world.
Once again this type of article misses the point.
Firstly mobile phones are not only phones. They are recording devices.
Would any school allow a student to walk around with a camera or video recorder. Quite simply no.
Then there is the issue of safeguarding. Would we allow a child to bring in a 20 year old to a school? Of course not. However, there are a number of students engaging in communication with adults.
Quite frankly there was a better ‘simpler’ time. It was a time when mass communication devises didn’t exist. After 20 years of working as a teacher the mobile phone is a blight on society and where possible should be eliminated.
Lastly, i am sick of hearing that it is the teacher who is primarily responsible to educate children to be citizens. That is their parents job. Parents need to stop abdicating responsibility and step up.
Teachers are not a catch all and if they are then maybe the parents and the rest of society should pay us alot more money for the multiple roles we are being forced into doing.
Lazy opt outs re not applicable here, if you mean the lazy opt out of trying to manage down young people’s use of smart phones in schools.
It requires a lot of work, and doesn’t mean “asset management” but behaviour management, which is necessary in schools to an increasing extent. (This along with many other extraneous work schools are required to do, in the absence of it being done elsewhere, including at home by families.)
The work involved includes consulting with and obtaining buy in from parents, involving the student voice in developing the policy and it’s implementation and educating parents and young people. It might involve a phased introduction, like a new school uniform, and a disciplinary procedure which might involve further education (like speed awareness for speeding motorists).
This is about keeping children safe in education and about changing the culture, reducing addiction, like the smoking/vaping ban. A student could, in reality, smoke before being caught, or likewise bring an offensive weapon to school but the clear expectation is that they don’t.
Everything is messy in reality. Without clear leadership, as we have seen over many years, it is messier. It is up to schools to determine and implement their own policy in the absence of national leadership.
A ban in schools does not mean an absolute ban (outside school) and does not mean a lack of educational content for digital literacy and digital citizenship. It does mean responsibility for parents, where those of us in favour of a ban probably think it belongs