"Clear" non-use policy of mobile phones boosting environment at Wiltshire school
It comes amid new calls for Government action on phone use in education settings
A Wiltshire headteacher says her schools decision to ban mobile phones from use on site has seen a boost for both pupils and teachers.
It's as a call is being made by Ester Ghey, mother of murdered teenager Brianna, for the Government to issue a ban on mobiles in schools to protect children's mental health.
Esther believes social media had a huge impact of her daughter, before she was stabbed to death in 2023.
Stonehenge School head, Carole Dean, says her schools policy is "really clear", with students told they're not permitted to use them between 8:30am, when school begins, and the end of the school day at 3pm.
"Phones should be switched off and they should be kept out of sight during school hours," Mrs Dean told us. "We're aware that potentially pupils are carrying them because quite often parents want them to have them for journeys to and from school, which we understand is a safety issue. But that at no point in the school day should we see it."
Students at the Amesbury school are told to turn their phones off, with any seen switched on, or visible in any form, confiscated and locked away securely until a parent comes to collect it.
Mrs Dean said: "We don't give it back to the student at the end of the school day, we contact parents and ask that they come in and retrieve it, which also allows the parents to then have the conversation with the child about the fact that they're not following school expectations."
It's a policy they've been operating to since 2024, when the Department of Education set it out new guidance on the use of mobile phones in schools, although they had implemented a 'no phone zone' before that.
That guidance suggests schools could adopt the following policies:
- No mobile phones allowed on the school premises
- Mobile phones handed in on arrival
- Mobile phones kept in secure location, which pupils do not access throughout the school day
- Pupils may keep their phones but they are “never used, seen or heard”.
Ban boosts school environment
Mrs Dean told us they'd taken the step to ban phones at the school in 2018, due to the "serious impact" they were having on learning and wasting critical staff time.
She said: "They can disrupt lessons. Phones can go off, you get the the notifications, the noise during a lesson pupils, potentially trying to listen to music as they walked around the school site.
"But one of our biggest motivators actually related to cyber bullying, safeguarding issues and social media issues, where quite often phones had been used to send unpleasant messages to other pupils during the school day, or just aspects that were meaning that children were not keeping themselves safe, so they weren't using them in a in a sensible way."
Mrs Dean told us that a significant amount of staff time was spent dealing with issues of bullying or safeguarding issues, much of which has reduced within school due to phone use not being permitted and the action taken should a phone be seen in use.
It's also giving the staff more time to plan and deliver higher quality lessons and providing students the support they need throughout a school day.
Since introducing their ban on phones in the school, Mrs Dean believes it's benefitting pupils, as it's helped improve the school environment.
"Ultimately, it social time children are talking to each other. Whilst everybody's staring at a screen in front of them, they're forgetting to communicate. They're forgetting to actually form nice relationships with their peers and we spotted that that was a really quick impact when we originally banned them from school sites," she said.
Government issued guidance "helpful"
Mrs Dean says it's useful to have the Government lead the way on how to tackle the issue of phones in schools, saying it can help provide consistency.
She references the 2024 guidance, which helps them push back against pressure from students.
"It allows us to make sure that we've got a consistent message. We can avoid pressure from the pupils and from the parents to override policy. So we've because ours is really clear, we're able to enforce it in a really consistent manner across the school and refer back to our policy when we need to," she said.
Mrs Dean added that it might be "helpful" for the Government to escalate its position to a complete ban.
She said: "If the government is able to actually say that we want all schools to follow this by the book across the whole country and that actually is potentially mandatory, you'd probably find it much more consistent, and therefore all schools would have some sort of system like ours."