It is two years on from many Australian states announcing school smartphone bans. I was contacted for comment on ‘whether or not the phone bans were the gamechanger we think they were’. The final piece in the Guardian is here. Below are my full comments to the main questions.

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Most Australian states have had no phones in schools for about two years in October, leading the world in bans. What were some of the reasons for the ban? 

A wide range of claims were made to justify these bans. We were told that phone bans would reduce cyberbullying, increase students’ concentration in class, and relieve teachers of having to discipline students over phone misuse. Some politicians were promising improvements in student learning and mental health.

But one of the main drivers of these bans was undoubtedly that they were popular. At the beginning of 2019 we ran a nationally representative survey of over 2000 adults that found nearly 80% support for classroom bans, and nearly one-third support for total schoolwide bans. This was remarkably consistent across all demographics – including political affiliation.

So, announcing phone bans for school students was an easy popularity boost for politicians rather than, say, imposing a total phone ban for car drivers (which is arguably far more necessary).

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The bans were lauded and criticised at the time – why do you think people felt so passionately about it? And why might they have been divided?

The topic of school phone bans has become a strong bone of contention – there are far more contentious issues around digital technology use in education, but phone bans are something that continues to really get people riled up.

In one sense, I suspect that schools are a proxy for wider concerns that parents and politicians have about children and digital devices. Young people spend way more time outside school, so really we should be talking about how parents and families regulate their children’s device use at home. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that most politicians want to do. 

So, school phone bans are a relatively pain-free way for people to feel that they are doing something about the wider problems we have with excessive digital device use. School phone bans play well to harassed parents and teachers, as well as reassuring older generations that something is being done about young people using their phones too much and being stuck to screens 24/7.

On the other hand, there are many reasons to push back. Some educators are upset that phones are being taken out of classrooms because these are incredibly powerful learning tools. Phones can be a great way of getting students collaborating, communicating and creating content together, and there plenty of evidence from media education researchers about the learning benefits of phones.

Phone use proved to be a really useful way of supporting student learning during the COVID lockdowns, and there were hopes that this could continue once we got back to face-to-face classes. For some teachers, no longer having the option of getting students to use their phones when appropriate is a missed opportunity.

Finally, many people would see phone bans as signalling a fundamental lack of trust in young people – especially those who will soon be leaving school. It is even argued that preventing students from having phones in school is a human rights issue, especially for young people with unpredictable home lives or outside school obligations such as caring for family members.

Regardless of what you think of these arguments against phone bans, they illustrate how complex the issue is, and how there isn’t an easy one-size-fits-all response. Unfortunately, Australia now has pretty inflexible one-size-fits-all policies in place.

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What research can you talk to (your own, or research you’re familiar with) on the impact of phones in classrooms? Or what is your own personal view? 

Those in favour of banning phones in schools are certainly scrabbling around for proof that these bans work, but most of the research in this area is inconclusive, and a lot of it is not particularly rigorous.

So, you will find some studies which point out correlations between phone bans and improvements in learning, but these cannot be seen as providing reliable evidence of direct causal relationships. 

There are so many factors influencing students’ learning that it is really difficult to make a confident link without setting up something like a carefully controlled randomised controlled trial.

Unfortunately, most of the bans in Australia were not set up with the intention of properly testing their effectiveness. These were spruiked as common-sense measures that politicians had already decided in advance would work.

Interestingly, some of the more sophisticated number-crunching that we’ve seen around the world seems to suggest no real widespread impact. Perhaps most inconvenient for phone ban supporters was analysis of the 2022 PISA data from OECD – nearly 700,000 students from over 80 countries – that actually showed that countries with a higher proportion of  schools with phone bans then the lower the PISA scores.

Another recent UK study focusing on data from 30 schools and more than 1200 students found no significant differences for students attending schools with smartphone bans in terms of their mental wellbeing, sleep, education performance in English and Maths, or even disruptive classroom behaviour.

This latter sort of finding makes sense if you consider that things like mental health and learning performance are complex phenomena with many different contributing factors. It is naïve to think that a phone ban is going to directly and significantly shift the dial on any of these issues in and by itself.

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What impact (to your knowledge) has the ban had on schools, on students, on learning, etc since? Has anything changed in that time? Did we overestimate the impact of phones?

Some of the politicians responsible for bans have been pretty gung-ho in declaring an almost instant success. But in reality the impact is mixed.

For sure, many of those teachers previously unhappy with having to deal with students’ misbehaviour with phones are now happier that they have one less thing to worry about. 

On the flipside, teachers that were previously getting their students to sometimes use their phones in class to support learning activities are not so happy.

Schools all get to set their own versions of the bans, and in reality this varies a lot. On a day-to-day basis you will see some teachers turning a blind eye to phone use when it isn’t particularly problematic or disruptive. 

You also have to remember that a lot of non-government schools don’t have bans, and so still have students bringing phones in. In this sense Australian schools are certainly not phone-free places, and it is interesting that other school sectors haven’t rushed to follow the trend.

But even in the strictest government schools, students have unsurprisingly been quick to adapt. Schools are places where all sorts of student freedoms are restricted – so smartphone policies are just another thing in a long line of restrictions that students now have to navigate. 

Kids are pretty school-savvy, so you still find a lot of illicit phone use in schools regardless of the rules. Kids are also pretty tech-savvy – they are still using all sorts of other devices in class – not only laptops and iPads but also things like smart watches. So, there are plenty of avenues for being digitally distracted. 

So, just like the impending social media ban, it is pretty far-fetched for politicians to imagine that they can totally curtail what young people are doing with smartphones. 

Given that smartphones are a fact of modern life, it is a shame that schools are not places where young people can be supported to learn to make responsible use of their devices. 

Indeed, totally banning phones doesn’t seem to be an ideal introduction to the wider world where phone use is an integral part of many jobs, and also where a lot of adults certainly have dysfunctional relationships with their phones.

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Anything else you’d like to add?

For me, this is all a matter of trust, choice and balance. Individual schools are quite capable of making their own decisions and policies. Also, when you talk with students you tend to find that they have a range of opinions on restricting use of devices. Many young people can see the benefits of having time away from all their devices at school but also can see the benefits of having other times when they have options to use them. They don’t all relentlessly want to be on screens all the time but would also like to be trusted a little more and given support in self-regulating their use. 

It is telling that Estonian education minister recently came out strongly in favour of keeping phones in schools and not having a national ban. Their stance is that this is something that local communities can work out for themselves, and that having phones in some classrooms can have value as an educational tool and to support students to learn responsible use of phones. Estonia is currently the number one country in the PISA rankings.

In the future – once we’ve moved on from having total bans in school – it would be nice to think that Australian students can be involved in determining flexible rules around their device use.

On a final note, it is probably worth stressing that most people – me included – would agree that there is not a particularly strong case for having smartphones in primary schools. The controversy really applies to older students in secondary school – especially students who will soon be going into work, TAFE or university.