School ban on mobile phones for pupils ‘can go awry’

PRIVATE SCHOOL headteachers have been told that mobile phone bans led by “pure emotion” can “go awry”.

Dr Amy Orben told the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference – a leading private school body – at its spring conference in London that schools should make a decision about phone use and gauge if it works.

Dr Orben, an experimental psychologist at the University of Cambridge, said: “We cannot make evidence-based policy now in this space because technology moves so fast.

“So the important thing (on mobile phone use in schools) is to make a decision and track whether it works, and I think any wellreasoned and then well-tracked decision is something I would support. I think a lot of the time we’re led by pure emotion or fear – I think that’s when things go awry.”

Dr Orben said that teenagers are “really good at circumventing” bans and “you hear about school phone bans in boarding school where they just get a second phone”.

She compared this to the Government “struggling with the ban on online pornography” over the Online Safety Bill.

“We still don’t have a functioning system because the system would be getting people to sign into a pornography site via a credit card or going to maybe a post office and having your identity verified,” she said. “What we know is that teenagers, if they really want to access online pornography, will very quickly get around that, so you’re weighing up curtailing the ease of access for the whole population for some people who don’t have credit cards or don’t have a passport where we will curtail their freedoms.”

In 2021, then Education Ssecretary Gavin Williamson considered a classroom ban on phones but the idea was dropped.