Mobiles, Teaching Assistants and school pets

Mobile phones

With Australia in the news at the moment with their move to ban social media for teens, attention has turned to our own teenagers: how many schools have banned mobile phones? And are those bans effective? Back in February the Department for Education launched a “crackdown on mobile phones“, but has anything changed?

The number of secondary schools where mobiles are allowed on site BUT cannot be taken out while in school has gone UP. Last academic year 48% of secondaries implemented this rule – today it is 56%.

Schools with really strict rules around mobile phone use haven’t increased: schools with no phones on site AT ALL have remained at similar levels to last year – 14% of primary schools implement this rule, and 5% of secondary schools. There has also been very little change in the number of schools collecting phones at the start of the day (11% in secondary, up from 9% last year and 76% in primary, same as last year).

But with phone rules tightening up, has this successfully stamped out mobiles in the classroom? Not quite.

One in ten secondary lessons (10%) were disrupted by a pupil using a mobile phone last week – this is the same as when we asked last month, and the same as when we asked in September 2023.

And it’s not just lessons – in the space of a week, 60% of teachers saw a phone being used at a time it was banned.

Where phones aren’t completely banned, do teachers want them to be?

Would teachers at schools where mobile phones are allowed to be on the pupils’ person (as opposed to collected in or banned from the premises) prefer it if they were banned altogether? 76% agreed that they would rather have a policy banning mobiles, and of those 48% strongly agreed.

And this makes sense – mobile phones disrupted learning in a quarter of lessons (25%) in schools where mobiles are allowed to be used at break and lunch and only in lessons when directed to by a teacher. In schools where phones are collected in at the start of the school day, this number was just 1%.

Should England follow Australia’s lead?

On the specific topic of social media use, 87% of teachers disagree that the benefits of social media for under 18s outweigh the downsides, and this is an increase compared to when we asked last year (78%). Not only that, but 97% would want to see the Government introduce tighter regulations for teenagers and social media use.

Want to learn more about behaviour data? We have our behaviour report with School Surveys available for you to download and read now! Check it out here.