Should Mobile Phones Be Banned in Schools?
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Should mobile phones be banned in schools? A headteacher says pupil behaviour is better and bullying is down since he barred mobiles in his school. So should others follow suit? Teachers argue for and against
Patrick Barkham and Stephen Moss
The Guardian, Tuesday 27 November 2012 15.00 EST
‘Pupils come to school without a coat or without having had any breakfast, but they always have a phone,’ says one teacher. Photograph: Alamy
No – they help independent study
"You'll have someone's eye out with that" used to be the refrain of teachers in my day.
In malevolent hands, a pencil, a rubber, even a piece of paper could become a lethal weapon in class, and that's before we got on to compasses and Bunsen burners.
A mobile is the same: a potentially potent tool for learning but strangely feared in a school pupil's hand, where it is assumed to wreak havoc with concentration, unleash cyber bullying and surreptitiously video up teachers' skirts.
But isn't it also madness when schools that cannot afford modern IT facilities ignore the powerful computers in every pupils' pocket?
I was amazed when I visited my old school recently: having remarked how sorry I felt for teachers in the mobile era, several teachers immediately declared how useful they were in class. There's even an acronym for it: BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device. As one teacher has argued in the Guardian, this is the future: students using their trusted devices rather than a machine they leave in school at the end of each day.
Jo Debens, a geography teacher at Priory School, Portsmouth, a comprehensive with a mixed intake, was dashing out to take 30 pupils orienteering when we spoke: her students were testing whether it was easier to use an OS map or a mobile phone's mapping services.
Earlier this year, the school drew up a "mobile device policy" in consultation with
Should mobile phones be banned in schools? A headteacher says pupil behaviour is better and bullying is down since he barred mobiles in his school. So should others follow suit? Teachers argue for and against
Patrick Barkham and Stephen Moss
The Guardian, Tuesday 27 November 2012 15.00 EST
‘Pupils come to school without a coat or without having had any breakfast, but they always have a phone,’ says one teacher. Photograph: Alamy
No – they help independent study
"You'll have someone's eye out with that" used to be the refrain of teachers in my day.
In malevolent hands, a pencil, a rubber, even a piece of paper could become a lethal weapon in class, and that's before we got on to compasses and Bunsen burners.
A mobile is the same: a potentially potent tool for learning but strangely feared in a school pupil's hand, where it is assumed to wreak havoc with concentration, unleash cyber bullying and surreptitiously video up teachers' skirts.
But isn't it also madness when schools that cannot afford modern IT facilities ignore the powerful computers in every pupils' pocket?
I was amazed when I visited my old school recently: having remarked how sorry I felt for teachers in the mobile era, several teachers immediately declared how useful they were in class. There's even an acronym for it: BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device. As one teacher has argued in the Guardian, this is the future: students using their trusted devices rather than a machine they leave in school at the end of each day.
Jo Debens, a geography teacher at Priory School, Portsmouth, a comprehensive with a mixed intake, was dashing out to take 30 pupils orienteering when we spoke: her students were testing whether it was easier to use an OS map or a mobile phone's mapping services.
Earlier this year, the school drew up a "mobile device policy" in consultation with