Mat Pullen, Director for Education at Jamf, argues that banning mobile phones in schools misses the real issue and that purpose-driven policies and digital literacy are key to helping students use technology responsibly.
With the way the proposed legal ban on phones in schools is dominating the education agenda, you’d be forgiven for overlooking that schools have been banning mobile phones for the better part of two decades.
I know, because I was a teacher when we did it. It wasn’t a matter of governmental policy, the school decided technology was a distraction, so phones were banned.
So, when I look at what’s moving through Parliament right now, I find myself thinking: this isn’t new. What’s changed is the political attention, not the underlying challenge.
The question that needs to be asked is the same one I asked back in the classroom: what is the purpose behind the technology? Because once you start asking that, a blanket ban stops looking like a solution and starts looking like an avoidance of the real conversation.
Why blunt bans backfire
The problem with a blanket ban isn’t the intention but the instrument. Telling a school community that phones are prohibited, full stop, without explanation or context, is just too blunt without any real understanding communicated to students as to why it’s happening.
There’s something fundamental about adolescent psychology very apparent to parents and teachers but that policymakers seem to forget. If you’re a teenager and you’re told you can’t do something, that’s a reason to do it even more. A rule without a rationale doesn’t change behaviour, it just drives it underground.
It also risks conflating the device with the behaviour. I used to teach PE and if a child threw a javelin at another child, nobody rang the javelin manufacturer to sort the problem out. It was a behaviour issue that just happened to involve a javelin.
The same logic applies here. Remove the device without addressing the behaviour and nothing fundamentally changes. But teach children to behave appropriately and they’ll grow up to be sensible about how they use their devices. These young people will be expected to use mobile devices when they enter the world of work – it might even be the sole device they use, so this is a skill they can carry throughout their lives.
So, if most schools are already doing this, what’s actually needed?
You’d be hard-pressed to find a school that doesn’t already have a policy limiting smartphone use during the day.
Teachers I speak to regularly have all got different systems in place: lockers at the start of the day, phones in a bag, devices on the teacher’s desk. Schools that identified the issue years ago and got on with addressing it.
What concerns me about enshrining this in statute is the effect on how schools implement it. There’s a real risk it scares more schools into acting because someone told them to, rather than because they’ve thought carefully about why. And that distinction matters enormously when it comes to getting students on board.
A head teacher who stands up and says ‘we’re doing this because the government told us to’ creates an immediate divide. But one who explains that lessons are being disrupted because teachers have to waste time stopping and dealing with phones, that gets a very different response.
Children might not like the rule, but they respond to the fact that there’s a genuine reason behind it. Schools now facing Ofsted scrutiny of their phone policies need to ask not just whether they have a policy, but whether they can explain it to inspectors, to parents and above all, to their students.
Pursuing purpose-driven policy
The distinction I keep coming back to is between banning a device and restricting its use when it’s inappropriate. If you said to me, we’re restricting phones during lesson time to reduce distraction and protect learning, that’s entirely understandable. Just saying we’re banning phones in schools is an entirely different proposition.
During my time in the classroom, I actually used students’ mobile phones as a teaching tool, because the school hadn’t yet invested in enough of its own technology. Students who needed accessibility support used their phones to access their work. The phone met a purpose and the rules were clear: you use it for this; you don’t use it for that. That clarity is what made it work.
School-owned, managed devices, configured to focus on lesson outcomes during class time and used differently at break, give schools both the structure and the flexibility that blanket bans remove. A model where the school manages the device securely during the school day and control reverts to parents once it ends, finds the right balance between privacy, safety and practicality.
Thinking about purpose first and technology second moves schools away from reactive prohibition and towards policies they can actually stand behind and explain.
Digital literacy starts now
All of this points to something bigger than phone policy. The point of school rules isn’t just to manage education, but to produce students who understand why the rules exist in their adult life.
When it comes to tech, that requires embedding digital literacy properly rather than treating it as a problem to be solved by confiscating devices. Screen time is often framed as inherently bad, but there is plenty of positive use of mobile devices in education and that nuance needs to be recognised.
Secondary schools are often inheriting students who never had that foundation and I understand the challenge that presents. But you could write off a generation and say it’s too late or you could do something, bring it in sooner rather than later and at least have the discussion.
Even if a student has one year left in school, it’s worth helping them understand that there’s a genuine reason behind the rules. Digital skills, including the judgement about when and how to use devices, are employable skills and schools that treat phone policy as an end miss the opportunity to build something more lasting.
We can all agree that mobile phones don’t belong in classrooms when students are there to learn. But the way schools go about it cannot be as blunt as a top-down prohibition with no explanation attached.
Technology isn’t the problem; its inappropriate use is. Schools that communicate a clear purpose, bring students into the conversation and build the habits that underpin responsible use will always get further than those that simply hand down rules and hope for compliance.
That’s true whether the rule comes from a head teacher, a government department or an act of Parliament.
