A County Durham teacher responds to school phone ban
A County Durham teacher says while he agrees something needs to be done about kids on phones in schools, he does not believe that a blanket ban is the perfect solution.
It comes as schools will now have to decide on how to enforce new rules on banning smartphones by September.
Nik Jones, secondary school teacher from Durham, said: "In my school, we're relatively lucky. We're a fairly small school. All of our students have lockers, and therefore our rule is going to be very simply, you'll come in, you put your phone in your locker, turned off, and you can collect that at the end of the day.
"Most schools already had policies in place to kind of curb the use of mobile phones in the classroom. Broadly speaking, that essentially would mean that the kids were expected to have their phone turned off in their bag or in their pockets or somewhere safe and not to be used. Pretty much that worked very well across the board.
"The mobile phone, the smartphone is an absolutely amazing tool and it's one which in the adult world we use in our workplaces, you know, a great number of us to incredibly useful effect. We're denying the opportunity for us to support students, to teach students how to make use of these things, how to use them safely.
"I understand the premise behind it. We're trying to keep students safe. We're trying to make sure that they’re focusing in lessons. I think that the blanket, broad, heavy-handedness of it actually limits and stunts an awful lot of the opportunities that we could have had to educate the students on mobile phone use and with their mobile phones as well."