YES
Dr Sanjiv Nichani
senior consultant paediatrician, East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre and Leicester Children’s Hospital
I emphatically agree with the call to ban smartphones in schools for under-16s. Since the advent of smartphones and the 24/7 social media app culture, civilisation has changed irrevocably.
We are in the middle of a ‘screendemic’, leading to difficulties in speech and language development in early childhood and an epidemic of mental health illness in children and young people.
One study of 6,595 adolescents who spent three or more hours on social media revealed they face double the risk of anxiety and depression.
A research paper in The Lancet that studied 18,900 adolescents concluded that persistent frequent social media use was associated with significant anxiety and lower self-esteem and life satisfaction among both boys and girls.
Further reinforcing the causal link between excessive screen time, social media use and mental health difficulties, there are studies looking at functional MRI scans in those with persistent social media use. They show abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala – two parts of the brain that govern how individuals interact in a moderate, civilised and temperate manner.
These changes are similar to the brain changes seen in people with other addictions like gambling and drugs.
UK teenagers [on average] spend five hours on social media a day, demonstrating that children have moved from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood.
The only way to begin the mammoth task of tackling the screendemic and the addiction to smartphones is by banning them in schools for children under 16 years.
Schools that have gone phone-free report greater participation during class and increased engagement with other students during breaks.
Parents need to keep in touch with their children and there are retro phones available to provide that point of contact.
Addressing the counter-narrative that children must be given the choice to decide about whether they should have smartphones, my response is that as a society we do not allow children to drink alcohol and smoke tobacco in order to protect their physical health, so why are smartphones any different?
Parents keep children at home much more nowadays to protect them in the real world, yet we have allowed children unfettered access to the virtual world where there are virtually no safeguards.
Gloria Mark 
Chancellor’s professor emerita within the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.
Florida has already enacted a law that bans smartphone use in K-12 and that is being followed by Oklahoma, Vermont, and Kansas. We can’t simply ask young people to put their phones away during school hours--kids are clever and can easily find workarounds.
Having taught university students for over two decades, I have witnessed the effect that smartphones have on students’ engagement. It distracts them, and their performance suffers.
There has been a fair amount of research showing the dangers of smartphone use: cyberbullying, exposure to inappropriate content, and negatively influencing body image. We can now add to that body of research evidence that shows very clearly that time spent on the phone is time taken away from the class content. When a student switches attention away from the class, they lose context. The student is getting the class material piecemeal, and not with continuity.
This data convinces me that smartphones should be banned in schools. Smartphones distract students from learning class material—they are depriving themselves of valuable material that can further their education. It imposes a higher burden on them as they need to then spend more time making sense of the class material afterwards. Or they may get discouraged from having missed out on so much of what was being discussed in class.
While it may seem that we are policing students by preventing them from using their private possessions, we need to take the longer view. As a society we need to think about our young people’s futures. We need to provide our children and young people with the best climate possible for education.
- Read Gloria Mark’s book: Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life?
NO
Dr Pauldy Otermans 
co-founder of OIAI by Otermans Institute, which builds AI digital teachers, and reader at Brunel University London
In our quest to create the future for our children, outrightly banning phones for children under 16 is not only counterproductive – it’s a step backward. What is the motive behind such a move? Is it to prevent students from communicating in school and outside, or is it a concern about screen time? Whichever way we see it, the purpose needs to be achieved through active steps instead of choosing ignorance through outright banning.
If the concern is screen time, we need to reconsider. Today, learning is inseparable from screen time. From Google Classroom to virtual learning environments, education is deeply embedded in digital interfaces. Should we revert to pen and paper as the primary medium, or should we continue evolving down the digital path? If we favour the latter, banning phones for screen time is merely a superficial solution. Using the latest technologies, we can limit children’s access to specific content and even keep a check on the total number of hours of screen time they can have every day. Since I actively work in AI and education, I know that today our AI systems can even report back to us on our children’s online interactions.
Digital literacy is critical for social and economic survival, especially in the UK. Our reliance on digital technology is only increasing, and at an unprecedented rate.
In the next five to ten years, the interfaces we use today, such as computers and smartphones, might either disappear or lose their primacy as the main tools for digital access. Emerging technologies like wearables and bio-integrated chips could redefine how we interact with the digital world. With the rise of generative AI, our interaction with technology is becoming more seamless and intuitive. The mobile phone is our current gateway into this future, and banning it will strangle our children’s ability to navigate that digital future.
Banning mobile phones would create a digital literacy gap that is unacceptable. Bridging this gap would require costly and long-term strategies which are in themselves undefined. Therefore, removing access to phones outrightly would result in a gap that could have lasting consequences.
Instead of prohibition, we should integrate these devices in our educational systems in a balanced and responsible manner. The key question we must address is what harm we want to reduce and remove from children, instead of making a villain out of a device and an entire digital ecosystem.
