News Child-safe phones instead of school bans, experts urge

Smartphones should be treated like cars, not cigarettes with technology built to mitigate harms rather than being banned outright, academics have argued.

- HOLLY BANCROFT

In anew piece published in the British Medical Fournal, five academics who have studied smartphone bans in schools push for more child-friendly technology rather than phones being taken away.

Their intervention comes as Sir Keir Starmer told MPs at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday that a ban on phones in schools was “completely unnecessary”.

“I’ve got teenage children, almost every school bans phones in school. They do it already. We need to concentrate on what is really important here, which is getting to the content that children shouldn’t be accessing,” he said.

Research from Teacher Tapp, an app that surveys thousands of teachers in the UK, found in December 2024 that in 56 per cent of secondary schools, children are allowed mobiles on site but are not allowed to take them out of their bags.

According to the survey, the majority of teachers at schools where pupils were allowed to keep their phones, rather than hand them in, would prefer if they were banned completely – with 78 per cent of people backing tougher bans.