Like our homes, brains and lives, this week in education has been dominated by one theme – mobile phones. When should children be allowed to look at them (if at all)? What damage are they doing to their brains and how do we restrict harmful content?
Education secretary Gillian Keegan said on Monday that she wanted to ‘change the norms’ of phone use in schools by publishing guidance on how to banish these gargantuan distractions.
But whether they are kept in bags, stored at home or smashed with a hammer at the school gates, the BBC pointed to a 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment’s (Pisa) survey which found that 71.8 per cent of schools in England said the use of mobile phones was “not permitted on school premises”. A survey from teacher survey app TeacherTapp reported a figure of 80 per cent last year.
‘Dame Rachel de Souza strode into the fray saying that adults needed to address their own habits’
Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis chain of academies, previously tweeted that he didn’t know any schools that didn’t have a “wise mobile phone policy” already. They should, he said, be responding to the mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey who is calling for new laws to restrict children’s access to harmful content on social media.
The whole announcement felt like a pre-election dog-whistle to the hoards of parents tired of telling their teenagers to get off their phones, rather than a genuine policy to improve education. Less “stop classroom distractions” and more “we are the party of old-fashioned values”.
Meanwhile children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza strode into the fray saying that adults needed to address their own habits – such as checking Whatsapp at the dinner table, before proposing screen bans for children. “We really do need our parents and the adults in this country to have this conversation about our own addictions”, she said.
Just when you thought you’d had enough high-tech news, the poker-hot issue of artificial intelligence in education came to the fore on Friday, when ministers asked Ofsted and Ofqual to update their plan for how they will approach its potential for misuse. I’d be surprised if the person writing the plan doesn’t use ChatGPT to “organise their thoughts” before writing.
“Another story this week had some of us recalling the 1950s.”
Just when you thought we were living firmly in the future though, a few news stories illustrated how old-fashioned things in education really remain.
Risking being accused of “the soft bigotry of low expectations“, Lord Johnson expressed dismay at a government decision not to review GCSEs. Pupils, he said, were struggling to offer subjects best suited to their pupils because of an ‘overloaded curriculum, disproportionate assessment model and academically focused school performance measures.
“This government’s attempt to recreate a 1950s curriculum is of little help to many disadvantaged schoolchildren,” he said, from the safety of the Lords.
Another story this week had some of us recalling the 1950s – that of the union survey showing that schools still reject a third of flexible working requests from women. Unison said that public sector organisations were still “inconsistent, rigid and unimaginative” when handling requests from staff.
When teachers can “dial in” to that twilight CPD session on their mobile phones, they really have no need to be, surely?