Is the tide turning on children and smartphones? 

In recent months there has been a growing awareness and concern about the harmful effects of smartphones on young people’s wellbeing. There is now a significant body of evidence that the impact of smartphones on children’s wellbeing is overwhelming, and an upsurge in concern by parents at a grass roots level.  

The evidence  

Research commissioned by Ofcom suggests that by age 12, 97% of children own a mobile phone, with 1 in 5 children aged between three and four having their own mobile phone.

Problematic smartphone use (PSU) is associated with increased odds of depression, anxiety, stress and poor sleep quality among children and young people. Studies also show that excessive smartphone use can lead to cognitive, behavioural and emotional disorders, impacting attentions pans and overall mental health.

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt argues that these technologies, combined with overprotective parenting, have led to a decline in children’s mental health. Haidt suggests that children need more real-world play and independent exploration to develop into emotionally stable adults. The book highlights four main issues stemming from a “phone-based childhood”: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Haidt proposes several solutions, such as delaying the introduction of smartphones and social media, creating mobile phone-free schools, and promoting more unsupervised play.

The approach in schools

Policy exchange (a leading UK think tank) recently released a paper which shows evidence that effective controls of mobile phone use in schools can have a wide range of benefits. Policy exchange says that secondary schools with an ‘Effective ban’ (where mobile phones are not allowed in school or stored in lockers or equivalent at the start of day) were more than twice as likely (43%) to be rated ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted – more than double the 21% of all England secondary schools with this rating. In addition, the mean Progress 8 score (which is a score to mark the progress that pupils make from the end of primary school to the end of their GCSE year in year 11) with the higher score the better progress) of secondary schools with an ‘Effective ban’ (0.23) was noticeably higher than the mean Progress 8 score for any other policy type, 0.13 higher than the mean score for secondary schools with only a ‘Partial ban’ and 0.25 higher than the mean score for secondary schools with ‘Banned but phone present with student’, a difference of 1.0 – 2.0 GCSE grades, respectively. However, they report that only 13% of schools in England and Wales actually separate students from their mobile phones for the duration of the school day.

As its stands there is no UK wide ban on mobile phones in schools. DofE guidance says that schools should prohibit the use of mobile phones and say that it is right that school leaders make decisions about what works for their individual settings.

In continuing to take this approach, the UK appears to be lagging behind other European countries. Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Hungary, France, Greece and Albania have already got country wide bans on smartphones in schools with Belgium, Finland and Ireland in the process of introducing bans. However, there is a Private Members’ Bill in the UK Parliament – the Safer Phones Bill, aiming to ban mobile phones in schools and address the concerns raised about the negative impact of technology on children.

Grassroots initiatives to delay giving children smartphones

With the UK Government not yet taking steps for outright bans in schools, and the likelihood of legislation taking years to enact, there has been an increase in grassroots campaigns by parents in this area. Smartphone Free Childhood is a grassroots movement bringing parents together to advocate and promote a change in the culture around children and smartphones. They hope that collective action and ‘pacts’ by parents agreeing not to give children smartphones until at least the age of 14 (the end of year 9) will avoid the peer pressure surrounding children having smartphones and lead to a sea-change in number of children getting smartphones. 

There appears to be a turning of the tide of parent opinion on smartphones, but UK wide legislation appears to be behind, leaving it to grass root initiatives and individual schools to take the lead.   

The Birketts view

Empowered by research, grassroots campaigns are igniting and promoting national conversation about the harm of smartphones on the wellbeing and development of children. However, until there is national legislation banning mobile phones in schools, schools are left to make their own decisions as to whether to impose a ban on their use and or presence in school. In terms of the wider issue of encouraging parents to delay providing smartphones to their children until much later, that is a difficult landscape for schools to navigate, and requires communication about parenting in the digital age, in an evidence based and non-judgmental way, given the new evidence about the damage they can cause to children’s health, wellbeing and development.