Attainment is the key in the battle over smartphones in schools
But one battle we can win is to protect kids from smartphones while they are at school. Toilet cubicles filled with pupils’ doom-scrolling, lunch breaks spent bent over phones, schoolyard bullying supercharged by nudifying deepfake apps, and the sheer number of hours spent on digital devices. The evidence of harms caused by smartphones in schools is incontrovertible to any parent. But there are still plenty in the technology community who will deny the harms done due to phones and social media. Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated this uncompromising approach when he told a US Senate hearing, “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”
The winning argument though is education attainment. This is measurable. There are decades of historical data. There are international comparisons. The worrying thing is that our children’s educational attainment is falling off a cliff. The Program for International Student Assessment, conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in maths than students whose eyes are glued to their screens for more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. And those schools that are putting in place hard, “locker” restrictions on phones are turning things around (Policy Exchange found that schools with an "Effective ban" on phones had better school performance than schools with partial or no bans). Kids from more deprived backgrounds are worst affected.
This is the key battleground. Encouragingly, almost one in four countries introducing bans on smartphones use in schools in laws or policies from Côte d’Ivoire to Colombia, from Italy to the Netherlands, according to UNESCO. Can we in the UK create some breathing space from predators, fraudsters, filth and distraction for our children during the eight hours of school each day? I believe we can. Not because it is a panacea. But because it is a great start. And the winning argument is not the harms, even though that’s what exercises parents. It is the educational impact that will ultimately bankrupt the nation if we do not address the cause.
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