Is there enough evidence to ban smartphones in schools?

Or, was there ever enough evidence to allow them in the first place?

Almost everyone I speak to at the moment is reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, or has an opinion about it. Haidt’s argument is that unrestricted use of smartphones and social media is the cause of the startling rise in teen mental health problems seen in many developed countries. He puts forward four proposals to fix the problem: no smartphones for under-14s, no social media accounts for under-16s, phone bans in school, and more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

However, there are plenty of people who disagree with Haidt’s analysis, for a variety of reasons. Some say that actually, there is no teen mental health crisis: it’s all a function of reduced stigma and diagnostic inflation. Others say that there is a mental health crisis, but it’s better explained by other factors, like economic insecurity. Still others argue there is no link between phones & mental health, while others say that there might be a link, but that doesn’t prove that smartphones cause mental health problems. It could be that children with more mental health problems overuse smartphones & social media, or some other third factor is causing both. We need studies that prove causation, and so far those are of poor quality.

In some ways, it’s great that some of the smartest minds in society are engaging with this important issue. In other ways, what a nightmare for parents and teachers that all these experts are disagreeing so much. What conclusion are you supposed to draw from such conflicting views? If the experts can’t agree, what is a layperson supposed to think?

How much evidence do you need to act?

This debate reminds me of conversations I used to have when I was worked at Ark schools as director of research. As my job title implied, I was generally keen on research, and felt that schools in general were too susceptible to fads like learning styles and Brain Gym. But some of the head teachers at Ark offered some good challenges to my point of view. What are heads and teachers supposed to do when the evidence is unclear or conflicting? To what extent can every decision they make be research informed? Is it the job of teachers to be full time researchers? Surely there always has to be a role for common sense – for making quick judgement calls based on the available evidence rather than spinning your wheels and taking weeks to discover that on the issue you’re interested in, there isn’t really any conclusive evidence one way or the other?

They were right, of course, and I agreed with them. And in fact, it is perfectly possible to be research-informed and agree with this take. The line I was fond of quoting is this one from Steven Weinberg.

Suppose that a medical journal carried two articles reporting two different cures for scrofula: one by ingestion of chicken soup and the other by a king’s touch. Even if the statistical evidence presented for these two cures had equal weight, I think the medical community (and everyone else) would have very different reactions to the two articles. Regarding chicken soup, I think that most people would keep an open mind, reserving judgment until the cure could be confirmed by independent tests. Chicken soup is a complicated mixture of good things, and who knows what effect its contents might have on the mycobacteria that cause scrofula? On the other hand, whatever statistical evidence were offered to show that a king’s touch helps to cure scrofula, readers would tend to be very sceptical because they would see no way that such a cure could ever be explained reductively…How could it matter to a mycobacterium whether the person touching its host was properly crowned and anointed or the eldest son of the previous monarch?’

You can never eliminate human judgement. All that we can hope to do, as educators and humans, is to use evidence and research as a broad framework for the many judgements we will have to make that will never have precise gold-standard RCTs informing them.

Let’s apply this test to one of Haidt’s recommendations: phone bans in schools. If we do this, I think there were incredibly persuasive reasons never to have let phones into schools in the first place – and those reasons are not to do with mental health, but learning. Phones are a distraction, and distractions aren’t good for learning. The best book I’ve read about the relationship between technology and learning is The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, edited by Richard Mayer. Large chunks of the book are about the importance of attention, and how easily poorly designed multimedia resources can distract attention or focus it on the wrong thing. It is very easy to see how mobile phones would exacerbate this problem.

There is also an important question here about where the default and the burden of proof should lie. Over the last decade or so, laptops, tablets, phones and interactive whiteboards have been introduced into schools in almost every developed country. Very little robust research about the positive or negative impacts of these devices existed when this happened. Now there is some push back about phones in particular, but the debate has been framed in such a way that we need a series of replicable high-quality randomised controlled trials to prove they are a problem. But the argument could have been framed very differently. We could have said that we wouldn’t introduce any screens into classrooms until we had robust evidence that they improved learning - and if we’d done that, things would now look very different.

Do phones improve learning?

I think it is important to think about whether phones do improve learning, and what we’d be losing if we banned them. 10-15 years ago, I used to hear a lot more positive arguments for the values of phones in schools - things like phones being a part of the workplace of the future, not wanting to create a digital divide, etc. I didn’t agree with them, but at least people were trying to make a positive case. The only argument I hear in favour of phones now is the fairly negative one that it would be really difficult to ban them and just cause a lot of unnecessary hassle.

It is true that properly implemented phone bans are time-consuming. But more and more schools are implementing them, because the alternatives are even more time-consuming. Last week, there was a fascinating article in The Times with an in-depth explanation of how John Wallis Academy, a big secondary in Kent, uses the Yondr system to manage their phone ban. The head of the school is Damian McBeath – one of the heads I worked with when I was at Ark when we were discussing the role of research in education. Some of the anecdotes in the article are mind-blowing.

Within three or four weeks, “we saw real changes”, McBeath says. Teachers had to change teaching style, to pick up the pace of increased focus. In just one term, detentions have decreased by 40 per cent. The number of students truanting from lessons fell by 25 per cent. “We asked one of our regular truants, ‘What changed?’ and he says, ‘Well, you know, if I don’t want to go to geography, I can’t go and watch Netflix in the toilets.’”

Another surprise: the safeguarding reports of social media issues, which were already low, but have “dropped off a cliff”. They are at the lowest level in the four years McBeath has been at the school. “We still haven’t understood that, since you would imagine that takes place largely outside school.”

Does anyone think that what John Wallis are doing is wrong? I went back and reread some of the arguments of people who think the phone-mental health link is overstated, to see what they think about the phone-learning link. On their podcast The Studies Show, Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers specialise in working through research papers and showing why they are not all they are cracked up to be, and in a recent episode they explain why they think phones don’t cause mental health problems. At the end, they discuss whether phones should be allowed in lessons, and conclude they shouldn’t.

Banning them in classroom while you're teaching a lesson, if you're a teacher, I think that makes sense.

I can't see a problem with that.

You wouldn't want them reading a book during a lesson.

Or writing each other messages on bits of paper and passing them around.

Yeah, exactly.

People got in trouble for that.

People got in trouble for that when they were passing notes in class in our day.

And if you're doing the digital equivalent, it doesn't matter that it's on a phone.

I was quite astonished to hear this. They don’t agree with any of Haidt’s evidence, but they accept that one of his central recommendations is right, and they don’t really even want to see any evidence for it. They just say, well of course, phones are a distraction and shouldn’t be in lessons. No evidence needed. Just common sense!

So here is a genuine question. Is there anyone out there willing to make the positive case in favour of having phones in school?  Is there anyone who thinks that what John Wallis Academy are doing is a bad idea? I can’t find anyone making this case. And if there isn’t much of a case, then why aren’t more schools implementing similar policies?