There’s a reason Eton is restricting smartphones

Eton College has just announced that from September it will ban new pupils from bringing smartphones to school, and instead give them a basic Nokia school mobile phone that can only make calls and send text messages. Eton currently does not allow pupils to carry phones during the day, and all pupils up to the sixth form must return all devices by evening. Many other private schools have similar policies: from September, seventh-year pupils at Brighton College will not be allowed to have internet-enabled phones in the school, and all offline devices will still have to be locked away during the school day. The deputy headteacher at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich has written to parents of pupils starting in the seventh form, urging them to buy their children only “dumb phones”.

It’s not just the private sector. Many state schools already have admirable initiatives to curb smartphone use. For example, pupils at John Wallis Church of England Academy in Ashford, Kent, have to put their phones in a magnetically sealed cloth bag in their bag, with the magnetic lock only being released at the end of the day. This has had an impressive impact: since the scheme was introduced in January, the school has seen a 40 per cent drop in detentions and a 25 per cent drop in truancies. Wilson’s School, an all-boys primary school in Sutton, already bans smartphones from its youngest boys, while All Saints Catholic College in Notting Hill has already trialled a 12-hour school day to help break phone addiction, with any phones spotted on school grounds being confiscated and locked in a safe for five days.

Sadly, these schools are the exception rather than the rule. Although the vast majority of schools have some form of ban on phones, only 11 per cent of schools in England and Wales physically separate pupils from their phones for the duration of the school day, even though we know that the mere presence of a phone is distracting. Many schools still allow pupils to use their phones during breaks or lunch, or discreetly turn a blind eye to the occasional under-desk check because it is easier than dealing with negative reactions from pupils and, all too often, parents.

It is also worth noting that there is a difference between introducing such a smartphone policy at Eton boarding school, which is already a highly controlled and supervised environment in which schools operate as a parent – and the public day school, where kids only attend for six or seven hours. In the case of the latter, they can have as many lockers as they want, but they still have to deal with all the problems and consequences of students having unlimited access to smartphones for the rest of the day: sleep deprivation, poor concentration, cyberbullying, low self-esteem, access to inappropriate content, and a toxic cycle of addiction and anxiety. If schools don’t convince parents to stop buying smartphones for their younger teens, the constant dopamine stimulation of digital life will inevitably take its toll on them.

There’s also a wealth gap that needs to be acknowledged. While it may seem counterintuitive, children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to own mobile phones at a young age. Their parents are also much less likely to impose limits on their screen time (which makes sense, given that they’ll have less access to after-school activities and other clubs, or may be working or single parents and therefore less able to monitor phone use). According to Smartphone Free Childhood, the data shows that the harm from smartphones hits those in the lowest-income households the hardest: on average, they spend twice as much time per day in front of screens and are twice as likely to report being physically threatened online.

Now is the right time for the Department of Education to address this and consider how we can ensure All children and young people are free from the influence of smartphones, not just the most privileged.

We don’t need another consultation or study on the impact of phones – there is already overwhelming evidence that smartphones are fundamentally changing every aspect of children’s mental, physical, social and emotional lives. We need support and guidance to help schools, and more importantly, parents, start this digital detox. For example, how about a national, coordinated campaign encouraging parents to wait until a certain age to buy their children a smartphone, or introducing stricter age verification measures on social media? There are options, but the longer we wait, the greater the risk to our children’s health and happiness.