**Reprinted with author’s permission**

For further writing on media education and related issues, see David Buckingham’s website: www.davidbuckingham.net

Reviewing arguments for and against – and proposing a media education approach.

Last week, I participated in a webinar about mobile phones in schools organised by IAME, the International Association for Media Education. The webinar was recorded, and it’s now available here. What follows are some personal observations on the issue, including a few ‘provocations’ that I wasn’t able to raise at the time.

In many parts of the world, there are moves to ban or restrict students’ use of mobile phones in schools. In some cases, we’re talking about a total ban, in which phones cannot be brought into the school building; while in others, there are restrictions whereby phones can only be accessed at particular times of day, in particular locations, or for particular purposes. In some cases, bans are simply being imposed at national, regional or school level; although in other cases, the rules are negotiated with students.

This is happening at a time of growing anxiety about what young people are doing with phones outside schools, and the impact of this on their mental health. There’s a great deal of talk about this in the media, and many politicians are keen to weigh in on the topic. The debate has been provoked most recently by Jonathan Haidt’s book Anxious Generation, although that book replays some arguments made several years ago by Jean Twenge (which I discussed here). To say the least, it’s a book that has been very much challenged and contested.

In the UK, we have what appears to be a parents’ campaign for ‘smartphone-free childhoods’; while in Australia the government is banning children under 16 from having social media accounts. As ever, a lot of issues tend to be blurred together here. It’s not always clear whether we’re talking about phones specifically or screens more broadly; about particular types of activity or content, or the use of these devices in general; and whether this is just about social media, or the internet as a whole. There is undoubtedly a familiar tendency here to blame all the ills of the world on media – mental ill-health, addiction, educational underachievement, bullying and abuse, and so on and so on.

One of the latest instances of this kind of alarmist approach in the UK was a two-part Channel 4 documentary entitled Swiped: The School that Banned Smartphones, broadcast just before Christmas 2024 (there’s a trailer here). The programme featured two reality TV presenters leading an ‘experiment’ in which a class of 12-13 year olds were asked to give up their smartphones for three weeks. The ‘results’ were taken as evidence that smartphones should be immediately banned for under-14s. This was a truly shameful piece of television, which was fatally lacking in authenticity or credibility – in many ways, a classic instance of how complex issues are conflated and misrepresented in public debate.

At least in the UK, there is a big contradiction in the current rhetoric around technology in education. On the one hand, the government talks about ‘turbocharging’ AI; while on the other, it talks about banning technology. The Department for Education guidance document (issued in 2024, under the previous government) is quite unequivocal: it recommends prohibiting, rather than merely restricting, the use of phones throughout the school day, not just in lessons.

And so we have technologies (like AI) of unproven benefit, which many see as problematic and dangerous on many levels, that have to be ‘turbocharged’ in order that the UK can compete in the global economy; and then we have technologies that are now a ubiquitous part of children’s everyday lives, but these have to be prohibited. The key issue for the Department for Education, it would seem, is that children should not be bringing their experience and knowledge from outside school into the classroom.

It would be tempting to see this as yet another media panic. As media educators know all too well, there is a history of excluding media from schools, and of teaching against media, that goes back through comic books and television and computer games. There is a long-standing desire to have a kind of cordon sanitaire that keeps all these dangerous aspects of children’s lives out of the school, and allows us to pretend that they don’t exist – although of course this is much harder when we’re talking about mobile devices.

The current controversy does seem to share several classic characteristics of earlier media panics. It’s about blaming the media for social problems (poor wellbeing, increasing levels of anxiety, bullying), in order to distract attention away from other possible causes. Rather than looking at rising inequality, austerity, or even the effects of the pandemic – or more specifically at the impact of teacher shortages, or the way that increasingly narrow and disciplinarian approaches to schooling might have contributed to anxiety – we find a convenient object and we try to ban it. And here too, there is a familiar kind of displacement: we focus on children, even though many of the problems that concern us apply just as much to adults.

There are some problems with this idea of ‘media panic’, especially if it’s used as a way of dismissing genuine concerns. But all this makes it quite hard to have a nuanced, sensible debate. There is a danger that policy will be led by alarmist media commentary and by politicians’ courting of popularity, rather than by evidence or by good educational practice. Surveys tend to show that these moves are quite widely supported, although it’s a characteristic of public opinion surveys that when you ask people if they would like to ban things – particularly for other people, like children, rather than for themselves – then they tend to say they would.

This situation poses some interesting dilemmas for media educators in particular. On the one hand, we have traditionally argued that schools should be responsive to students’ out-of-school experiences of media and technology, and that we need to make constructive, critical use of them. Mobiles are a ubiquitous, pervasive part of young people’s everyday lives; young people’s media culture today is mobile media culture. How can we teach about these things when the school (or the government) has already decided it wants to keep them out?

Yet on the other hand, there are some good reasons for controlling their use. No teacher wants students to be scrolling through their phones in lessons when they should be listening and concentrating and actively participating in what’s going on. Yet in reality, schools already restrict the use of mobiles: while this might not always amount to a total ban, there will be controls on when and where phones can be used – keep your phone on silent, turn off notifications, keep it in your bag or your pocket. (I’d certainly be keen to hear from anyone who is aware of schools where there are no restrictions whatsoever.) However, restricting is different from banning; and there’s a difference between rules that are negotiated and agreed between teachers and students and rules that are simply imposed from above.

What does academic research tell us about banning or restricting the use of mobiles in schools? There have been several reviews of research, of which the most useful are one by the London School of Economics, and another by a group of Australian researchers (there are also helpful blog summaries here and here). Both reviews entailed systematic searches, but they found very little peer-reviewed research specifically on the effects or effectiveness of bans. Studies used different designs, definitions and samples, and came up with quite contradictory results. Many suffered from the familiar problems of media effects research: there was a tendency to overstate small effect sizes (or make much of statistically non-significant results), and to confuse correlation and causality. Both reviews agree that the available evidence is far from conclusive.

There are three main concerns here, which are sometimes unhelpfully conflated. Firstly, there is the issue of distraction: incoming messages and notifications, as well as the apparent need to constantly check our phones, can lead students to get sidetracked into irrelevant material, and this can undermine their focus on learning. The second issue is bullying, the use of social media for harassment and abuse; and the third, less frequently addressed, is to do with privacy, and especially the gathering and use of data, not least by the commercial companies that provide these devices and services. These are issues that apply to networked technology in general, but to a greater or lesser extent they are accentuated by the use of mobile devices, both for communication and for recording or creating content.

There is some evidence that banning phones can lead to improvements in academic achievement, although only among low-achieving students; but there are some large-scale studies that fail to find this. Some studies find improvements in mental well-being, but others don’t, and some find bans are actually harmful, possibly because students view bans themselves as punitive, and as part of an authoritarian ethos that causes greater anxiety. In terms of cyberbullying, studies also point in opposite directions – some say bans reduce it, some say they increase it – and of course bullying happens in many forms in any case.

Of course, the fact that research doesn’t tell us very much isn’t necessarily a reason to do nothing. We could wait for ever for definitive proof, and we might never agree on what counts as convincing evidence. Research is only part of the picture.

There might be an interesting analogy to be made here with policies on school uniform – and I say this in the knowledge that the UK is one of the keenest countries in the world on having children all dressed in exactly the same way. There’s no evidence that I’ve seen that proves that school uniforms improve children’s learning, or indeed that they socialise them for a world in which very few of us wear anything resembling a uniform anymore. There’s no evidence that they reduce bullying, despite some people who claim that they do; or that they reduce inequalities between children – as anyone whose parents have struggled to afford a regulation uniform will know. And meanwhile, they certainly offer attractive profits for companies that supply them.

It may well be that there’s a kind of symbolic politics going on here – where there’s an imperative to be talking tough, to be seen to be enforcing ‘discipline’ and ‘standards’. As with uniforms, so with banning phones, this might be as much about what this represents as what it actually achieves.

Meanwhile, the issue that tends to be ignored is that uniforms, like phones, create another duty on teachers to police microscopic aspects of children’s behaviour. Experience suggests that students will find various ways of resisting bans – sneaking phones into school, concealing them on their bodies, putting one phone into the locker or the pouch while having another in their pocket. The UK government’s guidance authorises teachers to search students, to confiscate phones, and to give them detentions or other punishments if they violate the rules. It’s worth asking what messages this sends about schools and about education. And is this really the teachers’ job?

Unless rules are agreed and negotiated by all concerned, enforcing them is going to be a constant war of attrition. Students (and teachers) have to buy into the idea that restrictions are necessary and proportionate, and agree when and where and by whom they should be applied; otherwise they are very likely to resent them and resist them. Again, experience suggests that if you debate the issues and negotiate the rules with students, it’s likely that they will be inclined to control their own use, and to police each other.

If schools have good reasons for restricting the use of phones – or even if, as the UK government (for example) intends, they should ban them – are there not other things we should be doing as well? Is it possible to find a more honest and constructive, and even more educationally effective and valuable, approach than simple prohibition?

Despite ‘smartphone-free childhood’ campaigns, it is hard to imagine that this particular genie can be put back in the bottle, even if we want to do that. Yet there could be a need to teach what we might call ‘phone hygiene’ – to discuss what are appropriate and inappropriate uses of phones; when, where, for what purposes, and how much, they might be used; how we might learn to manage potential ‘distractions’; and how far we want to allow technology to govern our use of time more generally. In this, there is a need to acknowledge that many adults also have problems with regulating their own use. Any teaching needs to begin by taking account of realities rather than laying down moralistic laws that we can’t follow ourselves.

Of course, this kind of ‘phone hygiene’ education isn’t going to abolish cyberbullying or phone ‘addiction’, even if we think these are valuable ways of looking at things. But reflecting upon and debating our habitual use of technology might at least raise an opportunity to talk about such issues, and think about them a bit more critically.

Meanwhile, media educators in particular need to consider how far we can we apply and extend our existing concepts and critical approaches to this latest medium (as I have argued in the past in relation to social media or AI). Thinking about ‘phone hygiene’ is essentially about the concept of audience – it’s about reflecting on our own and each other’s uses of media, gathering information about what goes on, and analysing what it tells us. In the process, we are effectively positioning students as media researchers.

Another media education concept that is clearly relevant here is industry – that is, the political economy of media. Here students would be asking: who makes these devices and services, and why? Who stands to make money out of them, and how do they do that? Who controls them, and how much real power do users have? These are things that students can research, or at least find out about, at quite a young age. Here too, we need to be realistic: knowing how your data is gathered and used won’t necessarily stop you from giving it to Google or Meta, although it might make you a bit more cautious about what you share and how you use these tools.

Equally, phones can be a valuable creative tool for media educators – for experimenting with media language, for recording and creating new content, and for digital storytelling. Old lags like myself, who came up in an age of technological scarcity, might remember the difficulty we had in using a single video camera with a class of kids, or indeed in even getting hold of one in the first place. Today, almost all our students have a sophisticated video camera in their pockets, often equipped with editing software – although we should not assume they all have devices of the same quality. (Phones are also status objects, and bringing them out in the classroom can result in all sorts of battles for superiority.) Of course, the abundance of technology might create problems of its own, but it offers significant opportunities for bringing media theory and analysis closer to practice.

None of this should be seen to imply unrestricted use: indeed, what I’m proposing would have quite limited and specific educational objectives. Rules and restrictions are necessary and inevitable. However, simply banning phones in schools is bound to undermine our opportunities to teach about how they can be used appropriately, thoughtfully and creatively.