How children torment teachers with smartphones – by one who has been a victim

A trainee teacher in the maths department was shifting from foot to foot outside the head of year 9’s office, glancing down anxiously at his phone. I stopped to ask him if he was OK.

Without saying anything, he showed me his phone screen. On it was an Instagram direct message request from an account with the name and profile picture of one of year 9’s most notorious students. It read: “Open for a surprise x.”

My eyes widened. There was nothing I could do to help him: he and I both knew that he was going to spend his afternoon phoning parents, sanctioning pupils, talking to pastoral staff, writing up safeguarding concerns – and trying to catch up on all the work he would be missing in the process. I patted him on the shoulder and went on my way.

To say that mobile phones aren’t good for schoolchildren is to drastically understate just how pernicious they are in a school context.

During my time in the classroom, I came across students using mobile phones to covertly record teachers and compile them into threatening YouTube videos. There were multiple incidents of attempted identity fraud (my year 8 class once tried to pose as me on TikTok, while others harassed a married teacher on LinkedIn under another teacher’s name).

Other pupils set up a Snapchat group dedicated to stalking a female teacher at her gym. There was an endless background drumbeat of bullying and safeguarding concerns carried out over social media.

Mobile phone technology is precision-engineered to absorb as much adolescent potential as possible, and apps undermine both academic integrity and social dynamics at every turn, all while targeting themselves at an ever-younger target market in a bid to create customers for life.

The seductive convenience of games from Kahoot, a user-generated quiz-based learning platform, or allowing students to take photographs of diagrams from the whiteboard is far outweighed by the endless, grinding effort involved in keeping children safe while technology continues to outpace legislative capacity to restrain it.

I – and most teachers I know – think that phones, particularly smartphones, have no place in classrooms.

But for Gillian Keegan, secretary of state for education, to announce a purported “ban on phones” in schools and claim it as some coup for child discipline and wellbeing is a sleight of hand so lazy, it could have been generated by a year 10 on ChatGPT.

This is policy death warmed up – the Tories have mooted banning mobile phones from schools twice in the last three years, stopping because the majority of schools had lost patience with waiting for the government to regulate tech firms and introduced stringent phone use bans of their own.

What’s more, there is nothing to suggest that the proposed measure would be anything more than beefed-up statutory guidance with no enforceability. It’s the latest in a long line of DfE talking points that play well with older members of the Conservative base, while providing neither the resources nor the nuance necessary for meaningful change.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this is that it is in the government’s gift to address the very societal problems children take to their phones to escape. As my co-authors and I summarised in a report this summer, schools have a very limited capacity to improve children’s wellbeing, which is closely tied to their broader sense of identity, autonomy and life satisfaction. It’s these broader aspects of children’s wellbeing and behaviour that the government has systematically undermined through cuts to youth services, net zero pledges, local amenities, and – of course – safe schools.

Schools don’t need empty rhetoric on the evils of phones in schools – they’ve long since taken such matters into their own hands, and successfully, too. Instead, they need the government to do what they can’t, namely providing widespread, long-term investment in young people’s futures, whether by using schools as ‘hubs’, or by reversing cuts at local levels.

Until they do that, students will continue to be drawn into the murky world of fleeting thrills that their phones provide – and we will all continue to suffer the consequences.