Imagine if a city's schools.became smartphone-free...

A year ago, headteachers at 33 primary schools in St Albans declared them phone-free zones. Here are the results at one

- HOLLY BANCROFT

For Matthew Tavender, head of schools at Cunningham Hill primary schools, the problem wasn’t children using their phones during school hours, it was the pervasive influence of social media when his pupils left the classroom.

“We were dealing with the fallout on Monday morning”, he explains. “In the past 10 years that smartphones have been around, I’ve not heard one in school. But what we were seeing was the damage smartphones were having outside of school, and the impact of that inside”.

Last May, his primary school – along with 32 others in St Albans, Hertfordshire – decided to address the problem themselves. They sent out a joint letter to families, declaring their schools smartphone-free and urging parents not to give their children the devices until at least the age of 14.

The benefits, Mr Tavender says, have been clear to see.

A check-in before Christmas to assess smartphone use among his pupils revealed that just seven per cent of year 6 pupils have a smartphone, down from 68 per cent the year before.

“Our older children, who would have had a smartphone but now don’t – their attention is much better,” Mr Tavender says. “There is a definite improvement in their relationships. They talk more, play more, whereas a lot of our year 6s (aged 10 or 11) were quite sedentary before.”

Research from regulator Ofcom last year found that children aged eight to 11 are more likely to own a smartphone than not, with 59 per cent having them.

Once children go to secondary school, this is almost universal. At Cunningham Hill Schools, they had some children in year 3 (aged seven or eight) with their own smartphones, and this was not uncommon.