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Mobile phones are set to be prohibited in schools across England as part of the government’s plan to minimise disruption and improve behaviour in classrooms. New mobile phones in schools guidance issued today (19 February 2024) backs headteachers in prohibiting the use of mobile phones throughout the school day, including at break times (UK Department for Education, 19 February 2024)

In this blog, Professor Michael Thomas, Director of the CEN, discusses the UK trend to ban smartphones in secondary schools.

“I am part of a research team that has been investigating the impact of mobile phone use in adolescents in the UK (scampstudy.org). We have been following a sample of 6000 teenagers over several years, examining their phone use, cognitive development, health and wellbeing, and educational outcomes.

Over several studies, we have picked up small negative effects of phone-based activities such as social network site use, on both cognitive skills and wellbeing, particularly for children with heaviest use (5 hours a day or more) [1]. For example, high social network site usage in early adolescence predicts higher rates of depression and anxiety two years later. These associations were partly mediated by sleep problems, suggesting underlying mechanisms may be multi-factorial [2]. One of our studies showed that social network site usage was particularly associated with poorer wellbeing in girls, including using these sites at night [3]. Cause and effect are sometimes hard to pull apart – whether, say, risk of anxiety causes greater social network site usage or vice versa. But it seems safe to say that if there are pre-existing risks in children, social network site use can exacerbate them.

More broadly, my view is that it is important to separate the effects of the technology of mobile phones from issues that would arise in any medium. Bad whatever the medium include bullying, social exclusion, displacement of other activities through excessive usage (e.g., homework, play), and age-inappropriate content. Society needs to develop customs, norms, and expectations to avoid these behaviours as they appear in mobile phone use.

Phones and the internet bring specific new challenges due to their ubiquity, the wide reach of social networks, and the commercially driven optimisation of reward schedules that produces compulsive behaviour. Technology-specific problems include screen time addiction and intolerance of boredom, disruption of sleep, social media bullying, unreliable information, and data protection issues. These will require specific solutions, but moderating amount and timing of smartphone use seems the best first step.

I think it’s important to avoid reactionary positions (i.e., new = bad). All media will have drawbacks to weigh against their benefits. Reading, for example, can be viewed as socially isolating, discouraging physical activity, and providing a visually impoverished stimulus – but in moderation is viewed as a culturally valued activity. Mobile phones have notable benefits in allowing children to maintain friendships over geographic distance (which was very important in the pandemic). They have democratised knowledge in allowing children from poor backgrounds to access a vast range of materials beyond what is available in their local environments (albeit children now need to learn new skills to assess the reliability of information). Their contribution should therefore be viewed in a balanced way.

In terms of the UK’s new guidance on banning mobile phones in school, I would be cautiously in favour – but I also recognise it is a missed opportunity. I am a father to 13-year-old twin boys. Their secondary school has a complete ban on bringing phones into school. This has advantages – children don’t stare at phones but talk to each other more – especially when travelling to and from school; there is less risk of cyber-bullying; and reduced risk of mugging for handsets outside of school. We know that phones can be a distraction – just the presence of a phone in front of you, even if you are not using it, can be distracting [4], and this is just as likely to hold in the classroom. These are proximal effects relating to phones in school hours. But my children’s school still relies on the children having devices at home for homework, for timetabling, and to coordinate sporting activities, so it could not be said to be anti-phone per se. As a parent, it induces anxiety for my children to travel to school on a city transport system without the backup of a phone when things go wrong, which is a resource that even adults rely on. Yet it has produced faster development of confidence, independence, and maturity in my children.

I believe banning phones in schools is a lost opportunity because information technology is a powerful tool to support learning, while school-provided IT systems for computer-based learning risk becoming redundant. They are expensive, cumbersome, require restrictive firewalls, and quickly become out of date. Yet almost every child has a powerful, frequently updated computer device in their own possession. The opportunity is for children to use these in schools, but in some sort of Education Mode analogous to the Airplane Mode we activate on flights [5]. Such a mode used throughout the day would only give access to approved educational software, to support learning but not gaming or social activities that would prove distractions. But this requires governments to engage with commercial providers of phone operating systems, through incentivisation or regulation, and we have yet to make progress in this direction. In absence of such engagement, the trajectory of travel appears to be towards banning phones at school. This avoids the risks but is a missed opportunity.”

1. Shen, C., Smith, R. B., Eeftens, M., Thomas, M. S. C., Röösli, M., Spiers, A. D. V., Cheng, L., Booth, E., Elliott, P., Dumontheil, I., Toledano, M. B. (in preparation, 2024). Cognition and behaviours in relation to mobile phone and wireless device use and exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields: Evidence from a longitudinal cohort study of adolescents (SCAMP). Manuscript in preparation.

2. Shen, C., Serrano, B. M., G., Di Simplicio, M., Spiers, A. D. V., Dumontheil, I., Thomas, M. S. C., Röösli, M., Elliott, P. & Toledano, M. B. (in preparation, 2024). Social networking site use, depression and anxiety in adolescents: Evidence from a longitudinal cohort study (SCAMP). Manuscript in preparation.

3. Jenkins, R. H., Shen, C., Dumontheil, I., Thomas, M. S. C., Elliott, P., Röösli, M., & Toledano, M. B. (2020). Social networking site use in young adolescents: Association with health-related quality of life and behavioural difficulties. Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 109, August 2020, 106320. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106320.

4. Skowronek, J., Seifert, A. & Lindberg, S. The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance. Sci Rep 13, 9363 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36256-4.

5. Thomas, M.S.C., & Rogers, C. (2020). Education, the science of learning, and the COVID-19 crisis. Prospects, 49, 87–90 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09468-z