NSW parent Dany Elachi, founder of The Heads Up Alliance, told EducationHQ that while public school systems had been leading the way in the charge to ban phones from the classroom and schoolyard, the learning and wellbeing of thousands of students in non-government schools was still being hampered by the devices.
Speak to any teacher in a school that’s effectively banned phones during the day and they’ll tell you the powerful and positive impact of the policy, he argues.
“I know that in the short-term, it probably puts a burden on teachers for the first few weeks, while everyone’s getting used to the new rules,” he says.
“But in the long-run, we think it makes for a much better learning environment. And in fact, we don’t only think that, we know it, because of the experience we’ve [seen play out in] many hundreds of schools that have done this.
“When they’ve done it properly, the teachers say, ‘Finally, we’re teaching again’.”
Prior to bringing in phone bans, teachers were ‘fighting a losing battle’ in class trying to gain students’ attention, Elachi says.
But this is still the reality for many, he warns.
As one teacher from an independent school in NSW told The Alliance:
“…Many non-teachers really can’t grasp just how stressful it is in the classroom these days dealing with uber-empowered, short-attention-spanned, social-media-addicted youth.”
Concerned about the phone policy at their children’s school, one parent also shared their story:
“I removed both my kids from [a Catholic college] in Queensland last year as I had concerns with their mobile phone policy.
“At lunchtimes, my 11-year-old daughter was looking on another girl’s phone and making live contact with perverts and paedophiles through a website.
“As you can imagine this had a detrimental impact on her mental health and still does.”
The Alliance is running a petition calling on all Catholic and independent schools to sit up and take notice.
Elachi says while the group’s advocacy was the ‘catalyst’ for Sydney Catholic Schools bringing in a phone ban, some other school systems had not yet acted in line with the evidence.
Independent schools have varying policies, including complete bans, restrictions on their using during class time, or bans for certain year levels.
“Banning phones from schools might reduce the impact of use while students are at school, but it will do little once students leave the school grounds,” Marise McConaghy, now principal of Queenwood School, wrote on the Independent Schools Victoria blog in 2019.
“It certainly won’t prepare them for life beyond the school gates, where there is no teacher standing over them regulating use or forbidding its presence in their lives…”
Elachi says a ban is clearly the way to go.
“We’re a big supporter of ensuring that between the hours of 9 and 3, children are focused on their learning in class, so that makes teachers’ lives easier.
“And in the playground, the kids are interacting and playing basketball, doing real life, face-to-face things, rather than sitting in a circle with everyone’s head buried in an iPhone,” he says.
This August, South Australia marked one year since banning mobile phones in public schools under its ‘off and away’ policy.
School reporting data from the state indicates the move has had broadly positive effects, with a 63 per cent decline in ‘critical incidents involving social media’ in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2023 before the ban came into effect.
Behavioural issues have also dropped by 54 per cent, with 44 per cent fewer ‘policy compliance issues’ and 10 per cent fewer violent incidents.
Principals have reported immediate changes in student behaviour, as well as increased demand for extracurricular activities or clubs to be offered in break times.
And yet some academics and cybersafety experts remain opposed to blanket phone bans in schools.
Associate Professor Michael Cowling for example, a leader in educational technology for more than two decades, has previously argued a case for why schools need to strike a balance in students’ smartphone use.
“I think there’s a lot of scuttlebutt about what the students are actually using their devices for,” Cowling argues.
“And I think understanding screen use, as opposed to screen time, is important for us, that there’s a distinguisher there.
“Once we understand that, to me, the next step is teaching students how to effectively use these devices, and appropriately use these devices, when they have them.”
Others, such as digital literacy researcher Joanne Orlando, have contended that bans will likely leave children “without skills they need to be able to learn, work and live in a world saturated with technology”.
Elachi believes these lines of argument are seriously misguided.
“There are a lot of academics who still oppose phone bans, and we say to them, ‘just speak to the schools that have done it – we don’t have to guess whether this is a good thing or not a good thing. Why don’t you speak to the ones who have done it, and done it properly?’
“Those teachers are doing back flips ... that message needs to go out,” he says.
The argument that phone bans will prevent children from learning how to self-regulate their use is well off the money, he adds.
“It’s like, these things are addiction machines – adults can’t regulate their use of it.
“So why on earth can we hope that our children will be able to? It’s just better to get them out of the schools and let them learn for six hours.”
Rather than opting for “reactionary bans”, cyberpsychologist Jocelyn Brewer has previously called for “comprehensive digital education” so that young people are empowered to make “informed choices about their digital usage”.
Elachi, who last week spoke at the Social Media and Australian Society inquiry, says no-one advocating for phone or social media bans for children disagrees that students should be well educated about technology use and online spaces.
“[Some people] seem to paint a picture of ‘either/or’, and I’ve read many of the submissions made to the parliamentary inquiry – not a single person has suggested that we only raise the minimum age of social media and then do away with education…”
The Alliance’s school phone ban petition has attracted 2664 signatures to date.
