ST0006

Written evidence submitted by Mr Jonny Cole

I have worked as a senior leader at The Trafalgar School at Downton in Wiltshire since 2010. Previous to this I was the Head of Music within the school and have taught for over 20 years in state secondary schools of various sizes across Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire.

The Trafalgar School is a community facing, small secondary school serving the community of Downton, the surrounding New Forest villages and the city of Salisbury. We are a co-educational, 11-16 school, with 780 students on role. We highly prize our family atmosphere, and have recently received our Ofsted report (July 2023) which praised our “honest and just leadership”. Through the inspection students were seen to be “rightly proud of their school” and able to “stand up for what they believe in”.

In 2016 we were the first UK school to partner with a company called Yondr. This was part of a leadership drive to introduce a control on mobile phones. This control was not intended to be a ban, as we researched extensively the impact and effectiveness of bans, the views of our stakeholders and our teachers for their experience in using mobile technology within learning. Yondr worked alongside us to successfully launch their product within the school and we have helped to spread the benefits of such a product with them ever since.

For clarity, Yondr is a way of controlling mobile phones. Students lock their phone away in a Yondr pouch at 8.35am each morning. This is monitored closely by teachers in their first lesson of the day. Phones remain with students all day, with pouches in bags, and then before students leave the school at 3pm pouches are unlocked by teachers and students are able to access their phone. The beauty of such a system means that:

Teachers are not removing phones and creating conflict with students by taking something of value from them.
Students with need – for example, diabetes – are able to still access their phones to monitor their medical status.
Teachers can unlock phones if they are needed for learning – quick quizzes, recording, photography etc.
Where required, and in agreement with parents, students may be allowed to contact home if there is a family issue etc. and parents can contact students in this case also.
With so many students arriving in school by bus, parents can rely on contact with their child in case of emergency – this was vital to parents in the research we conducted before launch.

When looking for a solution to our desire to control phones we considered a number of questions:

Do bans work?
What do other schools do?
Does using technology benefit student learning?
What is the true intention of controlling mobile phones and does it work in our context and what we need for our students in a 21st century world?

What we found was interesting and has led to our school being praised widely for our approach to student wellbeing.

Do bans work? Put simply, no. What do other schools do? Most had bans in place locally.

We were allowed access to a number of student mobile phones in the research phase of our launch. Students openly shared and helped us to understand the activity they encountered daily. We found students being bombarded with DMs, snaps, videos, updates, streaks and on and on. The vast majority of these were being sent by students from other schools. These schools had banned the use of mobile phones, but the bans were simply not being effective as our students were being contacted hourly by students at other schools.

The benefits to student learning are clear, so long as the intention of that learning is clear. As a resource a mobile phone is a very powerful device. However, it is only more useful than other resources when tasks have been designed to maximise their use. As a music specialist, recording performances so that feedback can be given is vital. Without it a teacher would need to be present in the moment at all performance opportunities. Mobile phones give musicians a chance to record themselves and submit performances to a teacher for feedback at any time. This is vital for the creative process and closing the feedback loop which is needed for progress. Designing your curriculum to harness the benefits of technology is the only way for mobile phones to be utilised in learning well. Without this thoughtful approach teachers can resort to mobile phones as a form of entertainment and ‘baby-sitting’ and this is not purposeful.

Finally, our intention. Over time we have developed a collaborative approach to education within the school. Students are not “done to” but “done with”. Our intended goal with introducing a control mechanism was not about discipline, but mental health. There are undoubted links between student mental health and mobile technology. The bombardment young people face from social media is concerning and, as a parent, one which I am hyper-aware of. The goal of the school when we introduced Yondr was to provide students with a break from their phone. A period each day of 6 hours where they could focus their mind on learning, socialising and communicating without a screen as a distraction. This was our sole purpose, and our only intention. Yondr has never been seen as punitive measure within our school.

To this end, students were introduced to Yondr through a mental wellbeing lens. Students responded positively, and it is rare for us to find a phone not “Yondred”. They realise the benefit it brings, parents are fully supportive, and our school is a place where students run around on our fields at break, play sports, sing, play chase, and talk freely to each other. Cyber-bullying has all but ceased in school time, and pastoral support work can be aimed at need rather than sweeping up after a social media mess. We have found Yondr to be not only educationally effective; we estimate that the reduction in social issues caused by the use of mobile phones in school saves the equivalent of one person’s annual salary over the course of a school year, proving to be extremely cost and time effective alongside the obvious benefits.

This consultation submission was requested of me by Yondr. I would say that any political motivation to ban mobile phones from schools is not needed or required. However, the benefits of a thoughtful and well-implemented control is very much required for our young people. Supportive approaches and funding for the right tools to introduce the right solutions for schools would be a far more beneficial approach to this issue – although for some of us, we got there over 7 years ago.

October 2023