Schools: Mobile Phones

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, on her wonderful maiden speech, which was inspirational, as is her work as Dr Cass.

I have learned a lot from being part of our Learn with the Lords education outreach programme. For noble Lords not familiar with it, the format is that we visit the school in question, make a PowerPoint presentation and then have an extended question and answer session, followed by lunch with the head and/or senior staff. I always take the opportunity to turn the question and answer session around, and two particularly topical subjects with both students and teachers are smartphones in schools and the voting age. These students are usually in years 10 to 13—so they are mid-teens.

My findings are therefore derived from the strawest of straw polls, based on random visits to half a dozen schools in Hampshire. Nevertheless, the feedback from the students and teachers left a strong impression of a wider consensus. About the use of smartphones in schools there are two aspects: smartphones on the school premises as a whole, and smartphones in classrooms. The overwhelming opinion of teachers was that they should be banned from the school premises in total, while pupils could see the point of banning them in classrooms but were against them being banned in, for instance, playgrounds and common areas.

The arguments for having smartphones banned throughout the school are that teachers observe students becoming addicted to social media and arcade games in particular. Among teachers, there is an unprovable suspicion that their pupils’ young minds are being manipulated by cynically written software to increase their addiction. Teachers also noticed an increase in sleep deprivation, with many students falling asleep during class time or playtime. Their assumption was that this was caused by them having screen time, rather than sleep time, at night. An equal objection is the lack of social interaction, with children and teenagers no longer learning directly from each other but learning remotely from whomever or whatever is on the other end of their smartphones. All of this has been made much worse by the terrible decision to close schools during the lockdowns. During that time, their only same-age company was via a smartphone at home.

I visited one special educational needs school that had a variation on this theme: students felt the need to be able to contact their parents at any time, and not being able to do so could easily cause anxiety and distress. The solution here is obvious: have a phone that just makes phone calls and sends texts—in other words, phones but not smartphones. This, in fact, could be a wider solution to the problem at hand.

Two weeks ago, I gave a guided tour of your Lordships’ House to a teacher and half a dozen overseas teenagers from the Philippines, the Congo, Morocco, China, Ukraine and Argentina. Later, we repaired for tea in the River Restaurant. In light of the debate today, I asked them about smartphones in schools. It seems this is a worldwide discussion. The consensus was clear: a ban was the only way for students to be able to give their full attention to their teachers and each other. I know that this is all anecdotal evidence, but it is evidence nevertheless in support of a ban on smartphones but not necessarily on ordinary text and call phones.