The shadow education secretary says schools "desperately" need to ban pupils from using phones during the school day. Neil O'Brien adds that phones cause "a huge amount of disruption in class, lower educational standards and it's also bad for kids' mental health". The government has so far resisted calls from the Conservative Party to ban the devices. Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00So we're going to bring a vote on banning phones from schools in England and the reason we're doing
00:05that is we can see from the Department for Education's own surveys that schools are being
00:09hugely disrupted by kids being on the phone all the time. Teachers hate it, in fact young people
00:14hate it and so we're going to bring about a ban on all phones in schools where you hand your phone
00:19in at the start of the day and you get it back at the end but the government are resisting this.
00:23I honestly don't know why a lot of Labour MPs even think it's a good idea but the Education
00:27Secretary is saying that we don't need it. The truth is schools desperately do need a proper
00:32ban on phones in schools. So I've been pushing for this for a long time, I've been working on
00:35this since 2018 and we did push out statutory guidance which has made things a bit better
00:40but it's not enough. The truth is we needed to go further, we do now have the clear evidence that we
00:44need to go further and that phones are hugely disruptive not just for education but having a
00:49hugely negative effect on the mental health of young people across the developed world and that's
00:54why across the world we're seeing more and more countries going for a phone ban. All over Europe
00:58we're seeing countries doing that. Most of the US states are now on their way to a phone ban and yet
01:02here the government are resisting it and that's why we want to push this to the vote and try and
01:05get a phone ban. So some schools already do have good policies but the problem is that at the
01:09moment only about one in ten secondary schools has the best policy which is an end-to-end ban where
01:14you hand it in at the start of the day and you get it back at the end. A lot of schools still have
01:19policies where oh you can have your phone on you but don't have it out and what you end up with is
01:24the phones get brought out under the desk, the kids are on there, the teacher has to stop the
01:28lesson to try and get them off and the reason why that happens is that you get a small minority of
01:34parents who are very aggressive about wanting to have constant communication with their kids
01:39but the price of that for everyone else is huge amount of disruption in class
01:43at lower educational standards and it's also bad for kids' mental health.