West teen joins planned school phone legal fight

A TEENAGER and a mother-of-three have joined two fathers seeking to legally challenge government guidance on phones in schools.

- JASMINE NORDEN

Flossie McShea, 17, and Katie Moore, 43, have added their support to Will Orr-Ewing and Pete Montgomery’s claim for a judicial review which seeks to have smartphones completely banned in schools.

Miss McShea, from Devon, has joined as a claimant because she feels the Department for Education (DfE) has failed to protect her and other children from harms inflicted from phones during the school day.

She said using smartphones “completely changed my life from year 7 onwards” and that she still thinks about content she has been shown.

“I was exposed to pornography and violent videos, like beheading videos. I was sent a video of two young children who had found a gun and one of them accidentally shot the other one,’ Miss McShea said.

“I had to go home. There was a lot of incidents like that and a lot of my friends had the same experiences.

“All of this really happens at school because you can see live reactions. We're all gathered in this place, so people feel it's much more appealing to share this stuff online when you can get a reaction from 30 kids in the classroom. I think if I hadn’t had a phone, and if we didn’t have phones in school, I wouldn’t have been exposed to things that I would not want to be exposed to.”