Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall am 10:06 am ar 14 Mai 2024.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I congratulate my hon. Friend Miriam Cates—one of Parliament’s finest at this moment in time. I hope we will see her in her place for a long time.
I will focus specifically on phones in schools. Having spent my entire professional career before entering this place as a secondary school teacher—in fact, as a head of year, which meant that I had to deal with young people’s behaviour and attendance—and having been a Minister for School Standards, albeit briefly, I will say loud and clear that it is appalling that, despite the Government having issued continued guidance since 2010 that smartphones are not to be used in schools, only 11% of schools have taken the brave and bold step of enforcing the rule that phones must be put away and not visible or reachable until the end of the school day. That is bizarre when we consider that most of those schools go on to achieve an outstanding rating. Michaela, one of the finest schools in the country, has very strict rules. I implore anyone to visit, as I have done on a number of occasions, to see that when phones are put away, the results are far better than most grammar and private schools in this country, because young people’s attention is on the knowledge-rich curriculum in front of them.
I am quite embarrassed, to be frank, of my former profession. Not enough headteachers have enough backbone to take the fight to parents who may want to push back or to pupils who may want to moan and groan, or simply to fight the aggressive educationalists who seem to think that the phone is somehow a tool for learning in the classroom. They think children should spend their time googling how to mind-map themselves on A3 or A2 bits of paper, without any proper guidance on understanding the processes involved in things, from those as simple as making chocolate to ideas about how democracy was formed. That should come from the expert in the classroom—the teacher—who stands at the front, delivers the knowledge and ensures that young people have the ability to critically respond to different ideas and do not just find information, copy and paste it off their phones and write it on a piece of paper without cognitively taking it in or critically analysing it in the way they should.