Tom Rees — Chief Executive of Ormiston Academies Trust
What’s so bad about smartphones in a school setting?
Technology and smartphones have obviously brought many benefits to our lives but mounting evidence points to them being detrimental to young people’s learning, behaviour and mental health. We think this is an issue we should take seriously in our schools.
Phones still distract pupils in lessons, even if they are out of sight and in pockets or bags and we think classrooms should be about learning with no distractions. We are also concerned about the content that children can access via their phones and the risks of these to both mental health, and safeguarding. Addiction to social media among young people is growing. We are concerned by the rising trend of pupils filming students or teachers and then posting the content online. Not only are these situations unpleasant for those involved, they take time to be resolved, which takes teachers away from their work.
As humans, our learning is limited by the amount of things we can pay attention to. That’s how cognitive load works. In our schools, we talk about attention as the gateway to learning. Smartphones are designed to draw our attention to them, and therefore inevitably distract us from the process of learning.
We can see the correlation between heavy mobile phone users and lower academic achievement. In some cases, teenagers are spending eight and a half hours a day on their phones and this is associated with lower academic outcomes.
We think we are asking too much of children to ask them to regulate their behaviour themselves when it comes to phones. Teachers and leaders in schools are concerned that pupils are coming up with ways to remove themselves from the classroom so that they can check or reply to a message. They might say they’re feeling ill, or in some cases might misbehave so they get removed. This shows the huge social pressure that phones place on them.
What impact are you seeing on mental health?
We think the evidence is now catching up with what teachers and parents have suspected for a long time and that there is a clear correlation between smartphone/social media addiction and the increase in mental health concerns.
Some of this is self-reported, but we’re also seeing very real increases in external data points self-harm, A&E admissions, and attempted suicide. These are real things that are happening - particularly in adolescents. We see the phone-free policy as an opportunity to give children as many hours as we can of freedom from the addiction of social media. So kids can enjoy more of their precious childhood.
At Tenbury High, (an Ormiston secondary school in Worcestershire which has been phone-free since 2010), people often say the children seem quite young. We think this is a really good thing. They play tag and other games at break times, they speak with each other. These are the sorts of behaviours you see so little of when kids are all on their phones. At Ormiston Chadwick, our secondary school in Widnes, which went phone-free earlier this term, pupils, in particular girls, speak of how they are “no longer held hostage by their phones”. An English teacher there says that his Year 11 class is the most focused he has ever taught.
What do you think is the best way of minimising the impact of smartphones at school?
The best approach is one that doesn’t put the pressure on young people to have to manage that themselves – which means adults taking the decision for a school to go phone-free. We think we need to take the pressure off the kids. Peer pressure makes it really difficult otherwise. Then it all comes down to how a policy is implemented. Some of our schools have adopted the locked box option, where students hand their phones in at the start of the day and get them back at the end of the day. Others are going for the pouch option and some have very tightly enforced processes where phones are never seen or heard.
For other school leaders who want to do this, what’s your advice on how to bring the school community with you?
- Make this a positive message about the benefits to learning and wellbeing of being ‘smartphone-free’. The messaging can quickly become negative and about ‘banning mobiles’ but I think people are more inclined to get behind a positive narrative.
- Use evidence. Once leaders, teachers and the school community are exposed to the evidence, it’s hard to argue this isn’t a thing we should be taking seriously.
- Prove success. Any school leader knows they can only ever change one or two things in any school year. So if they’re going to pick this one it’s going to take a lot of their leadership capital and a lot of energy, and they will want know it will be successful. So looking at schools where the policy has been a success is crucial.
- Plan the implementation carefully. Schools who don’t plan the initiative carefully enough will end up fighting more battles than they need to.
- Engage pupils and parents early. It’s vital that they understand why you are doing this, why going phone-free will solve the problems you are seeing, and what your plan is. And it’s vital they have the opportunity to feed back. All our schools are consulting before they introduce their model, ensuring parents feel fully involved and reassured. And at Chadwick, which introduced the locked box option earlier this term, some of the feedback meant that they made an improvement to their model to make sure it ran as successfully.
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