How going phone-free taught pupils at English secondary ‘to socialise, old school’

Vicki Dean, the principal of Tenbury High academy, says visitors to her secondary school in the Worcestershire countryside think its pupils appear less mature than others their age because they are running about and playing rather than sitting huddled over their phones.

“When I worked at my previous school, I still remember social time was like this,” Dean said, mimicking holding a phone screen in front of her face. But Tenbury is different, with one of the toughest phone-free policies of any mainstream state secondary school in England, and Dean says that has influenced how her pupils act.

“Here, our children in year 8 are still playing chase and tag because they have got nothing else to distract them. They want to play football, they are being creative, it’s old-school playing,” Dean said.

“Visitors sometimes say, your children seem immature, but I don’t think they are. I just think they are seeing them play. In rural settings, when children don’t play when they get home in the evenings because they are geographically isolated, they need to learn to play and interact, and even what to do when they are bored.

“So we have to work on social time behaviour and what to do and keep entertained. We buy equipment and have lots of sports clubs to keep them busy. They are learning to socialise, old school.”

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Tenbury, part of the Ormiston academies trust, up until last year allowed pupils to use phones during “social time” before the bell for the start of school. But Dean said even that had been stopped, and pupils now had to hand in their phones as soon as they arrive.

Two minutes before the end of the school day, their teacher hands back their phones as they leave. “We know that they have to bring their phones, because we’re a rural school some of them are travelling long distances, they need to feel safe on their journeys and be able to phone their parents,” Dean said.

“So what we’ve done is make the phone handing-in process more secure. The children are assured that their phones are going in a safe box, that they are going to be kept safe all day and looked after. Each phone is kept in a padded box and they will come out in the same state as they went in. It’s about building trust with us to hand their phones in, so they can feel confident that they know we are going to look after them.”

Arthur Hall, a year 11 pupil, said: “Phones are expensive things and they can get lost or broken if they are rattling around in your bag all day. If it’s in that box you know it’s locked up and safe, you never have to worry.”

Eddie Sheppard, another year 11 pupil, said the policy reduced stress in other ways: “If you have your phone at school, you could have people texting you and you could want to go and check that. I think it’s better [this way] because it causes less distractions.”

But would the pupils trust themselves if they were allowed to hold on to their phones? “Eventually it would get too much and you would check it, you would start sneaking a look at it during the day. It’s bound to happen,” Hall said.

Rachel Kitley, the head of Cowes Enterprise College , a large secondary on the Isle of Wight, said she was in discussions with parents about introducing a phone-free policy later this year.

The college’s current policy allows pupils to keep their phones if switched off. “That policy has been fine for many years here but I think there is a need for change. Some of it comes from parents – our survey of parents had 70% wanting a stricter policy around phones. Only 5% wanted a more relaxed policy,” Kitley said.

“Parents mentioned [in the survey] that phones were a distraction. Somebody said they were worried that their daughter was obsessive, that she didn’t have the discipline to not look at it. Somebody else wrote about their daughter: ‘I hate her having a phone.’”

Parents said their biggest concerns were online bullying, exposure to strangers, the amount of time spent on social media, inappropriate messages and oversharing online. That day Kitley said she had stopped a pupil because she looked visibly distressed. “I asked her, are you all right? And she said: ‘I’ve forgotten my phone, I feel unwell without it.’”

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Kitley added: “We are asking young people to cope with more than they are able to, in terms of self-discipline and emotional regulation. It’s really difficult to expect a child not to look at their phone all day, every day. I’m not sure many adults could manage.”

But even a school with strict policies such as Tenbury allows exceptions, including for pupils with underlying medical conditions.

Sarah Hall, Arthur’s mother, has a son in year 8 with type 1 diabetes who has a monitor on his arm to measure his blood sugar levels. It communicates with a smartwatch and his phone, which he is allowed to carry in school.

“For me personally, the fact that he doesn’t use his phone other than for his medical need, it keeps him focused. You can see it in the classroom. I come in and out of the school and you can see there are focused children. And other parents I talk to all feel the same – some children don’t even take their phones with them to school, they just get on and off the bus, and that’s it,” she said.