Headteacher's Blog #25

This week the government produced strong guidance on the duty of schools to ban mobile phone use in schools. Schools now have a legal requirement to ensure that young people don't use mobile phones at any point of the school day. We will be working on amending and strengthening our mobile phone policy this term in order to ensure clarity and consistency in our approach from September. With this in mind I have included a consultation survey to assess the views of parents. We will be consulting with our students soon after. The consultation will close on May 8^th and I will publish the outcomes the week after.

If you would like to complete the consultation, please click here.

Whatever we decide as a school we will require parents to fully support us. Mobile phone use is a significant drain on the school's resources and a consistent point of conflict. LSA is a large school and doesn't have lockers or the ability to organise for young people to put their mobile phones in pouches, both strategies that have been adopted in smaller schools. Mobile phone use at school is a distraction, a safeguarding risk and is increasingly proven to affect academic performance. There are also hidden problems with mobile phone use in schools, for instance young people spending a long time in toilets on their phones, blocking use for other students. 

The only way that we can develop our policy is with parental support, using strategies similar to those used by Smartphone Free Childhood, a charity that we fully support. The aims of Smartphone Free Childhood are clear, that parents don't buy a smartphone for their children until they are 14 and that children have no access to social media until they are 16. For most parents of secondary aged children, I understand that the horse has already bolted on this ambition and that removing a smartphone from a teenager would be like removing their central nervous system. The key question for us is, have smartphones made our young people happier? The evidence is that it has not. As always, the welfare and safety of young people is paramount, and this means making tough decisions together. Thank you in advance for your time.