[user104658]

Originally Posted by Ammi

…I read an article earlier that said that this was in a consultation period so a ‘government ban’ hadn’t actually been decided yet and yet this has been reported as coming into effect in January…so that’s confusing, which is so often the way, I find…

…so far as phones are concerned in school…I feel that it’s something that should be a discretion of the head teacher situation and I generally don’t agree with a ‘cancel or taboo’ mentality either because it doesn’t teach young people to self discipline, remove a phone when a phone use has been abused and make clear rules regarding usage in school time…this would mean that mobile phones are blanket banned in schools so the inability to use and exercise good judgement and keep within school rules is taken away from a student …and then that student goes to uni/college etc with their phone and haven’t practised self discipline…

I’ve heard some schools of thought (escuse the noun) that suggest they could be incorporated into classes in creative ways as well, although personally I am against that but from another angle: I think it opens up an awful lot of inequality and competition between kids… some kids breezing through on new or newish “flagship” handsets whilst other frustratedly wait for their £50 Alcatel (or obsolete model phone) to load the app at all.

My wife (and to be fair to her, she is a heavy phone user for work) gets the “newest” flagship model every 2 years which means my eldest also gets a fairly new top brand phone every 2 years, but it’s really as a byproduct of my wife liking to get the newest one every upgrade. I’d be wary of a situation where kids start being EXPECTED to have a phone as part of school equipment.

There’s already been enough of that with the lockdown situation; some kids with geeky dads having no tech issues because they’re doing their school work on a 32” 4K screen on a gaming pc, while others are in the google classroom chat crying and frustrated because the ****ey Chromebook provided by the council won’t even load the work.

“Tech privilege” could quickly become a thing. It’s not even necessarily a money issue, my daughter has friends from properly well-off families who just “don’t do tech” and don’t allow the kids to have a pc / they themselves are happy with older phones so the kids have REALLY ancient ones. Usually the kids who were “later in life” to be honest and have parents already into their 50’s (and who are this a bit backwards and don’t really understand how integrated tech is into everything these days).