Smartphone Free Schools - 5th November
Generation Isolation | Snapchat | 5Rights
Dear SfS friends,
A slimmed-down schools edition this week as there is so much going on in the wider Smartphone Free Childhood movement.
As ever, if please be in touch with any developments of interest or if you think we can help your school with their moves to go Smartphone Free.
Best wishes,
Will
Recommended Reading
The youth charity Onside has brought out its ‘Generation Isolation’ report. Smartphones and the digital landscape for children predominate.
One of the main findings is that over half (52%) of children would like to reduce their screen time. Perhaps most significantly, 46% of them simply don’t know how to break the habit.
Snapshot and 1 minute video below.
Read the report here.
Here is OnSide’s video on how young people feel about their smartphones:
The Screen Time Consultant has a good summary piece out:
“Should Phones Be Allowed in Schools? - 3 Common Arguments Debunked”
She is based in the US so her concerns about school shooting mercifully have less purchase on us in the UK. However, her recommendations to parents could to my mind be usefully incorporated in schools’ communications to their parent body about the rationale for tighter smartphone restrictions.
My highlights:
You do not need to reach your child quickly; you want to. That’s not a reason to justify smartphones in school, especially when their harms and negative impacts on learning are well-documented.
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When it comes to safety, there are several reasons why children having access to phones in dangerous situations does not increase personal or group safety, and in fact, may have the opposite effect.
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Our children’s autonomy and privacy is an important part of their development. Surveillance not only erodes trust, but it is a violation of their growing personhood.
Tracking our children’s location is about our own anxieties and fears about the world; not about keeping our children safe.
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One very important note about effective phone-free schools is that the ban has to be from first bell to last bell– a ban “just during instructional time” is not a phone ban and will not net the same benefits. In fact, I would argue, it just muddies the water.
Snapchat —
We read two weeks ago about the X-rated pedophile hellscape of Roblox. This week, NSPCC brought out their investigation of Snapchat’s massively outsized role in online grooming.
The figures are astonishing:
The messaging app Snapchat is the most widely-used platform for online grooming, according to police figures supplied to the children's charity the NSPCC.
More than 7,000 Sexual Communication with a Child offences were recorded across the UK in the year to March 2024 - the highest number since the offence was created.
Snapchat made up nearly half of the 1,824 cases where the specific platform used for the grooming was recorded by the police.
YouGov —
YouGov polled parents on when a child should be given a smartphone - snapshot below:
Picking up one of the Screen Time Consultant’s themes above, we know that the main reason that parents want their child to have a phone for secondary school is in order to get to / from school safely.
So my reading of this poll is that the various efforts to bring to the market a safe non-internet enabled phone for children are of the utmost urgency.
Recommended Listening
5Rights hosted a revealing interview with Professor Sonia Livingstone:
Phone bans in schools: smart move or big mistake?
It was good to hear Professor Livingstone affirm the particular problems around SEND children - that though some might have special requirements for smartphones, they are also, as a group, those most likely to suffer from online abuse.
Happily, she also recommends that phones should be kept out of sight of children in the classroom.
Readers are invited to make up their own minds on how convincing are the other arguments put forward by both Professor Livingstone and the 5Rights Ambassador against a school smartphone ban: namely that children are best placed to decide these questions for themselves, and that only a tiny minority of children, who use their smartphones ‘excessively’, are harmed. I couldn’t possibly comment!