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Should schools just say no to pupils using phones?

14th July 2024

Natalie Grice – BBC News

“I wouldn’t say it’s a good thing for a child never to have a smartphone. I think it’s part of a balanced life. You’ve got to live in your own time.”

These are not the words you might expect to hear from a teacher at a school that has never in its history allowed pupils under sixth form age to use a mobile phone on the premises.

But Sarah Owen, deputy head at Stanwell School in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, was simply expressing a personal opinion, rather than the school’s view about a young person’s wider life.

It is clear that she and the school have very firm opinions on what is best for children while they are on school grounds.

For Stanwell pupils in years 7 to 11, that has always meant no phones. Not in lessons, not in the corridor, not at breaktimes.

It is such a long-established rule that it presumably comes as no surprise to pupils and parents when they join the school, which is starting to seem as if it may have been ahead of a growing curve.

In the past few years, a number of schools across Wales and further afield have introduced total bans on mobiles. While Stanwell only asks pupils to keep phones switched off in their bags, others require the devices to be handed in at the start of the day.

Llanidloes High School in Powys is one which has implemented this policy in the past few years and Ysgol Penrhyn Dewi in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, followed suit at the start of this year.

Sarah Owen has been at Stanwell School since 2000 and says that there has always been a no phone policy in the school. For Sarah, it is a question not of trying to impinge on their students’ freedom, but of giving them vital time away from mobile life, for welfare as well as educational reasons.

“We genuinely believe this is in their best interests,” she said. “Phone addiction and screen addiction and scrolling, the loss of concentration, the loss of soft skills around listening and interacting with others, that’s something we need to be concerned about as a society generally.”

“We want children to be interacting with each other, having conversations, playing football, having those connections and interactions with other people.”

Sarah also believes it gives pupils relief from the possibility of being “photographed, filmed, mocked in some way – that’s not a nice way for children to live”. She said she wanted her pupils to have “some sanctuary from the anxiety of feeling so scrutinised and looked at”. 

Adapted from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles

The mysterious death of Alexander the Great

    When Alexander the Great’s body seemingly remained unchanged for six days after his death in 323 BCE, his contemporaries could offer only one explanation. Alexander must have been a god. So… was he?

    Alexander the Great first fell ill during a days-long series of parties, during one of which he collapsed, complaining of a searing pain in his back. After 10 days of intense fever, Alexander’s soldiers were brought in to see him one final time. As reported by the historian Arrian, at that point the king “could no longer speak… but he struggled to raise his head and gave each man a greeting with his eyes.”

    When Alexander was declared dead on June 13, theories began forming. Had he been poisoned? Sabotaged? Had he been killed by drinking too much wine? Today we have an explanation for Alexander’s death and his period of bodily freshness that relies less on the supernatural and more on science. In 2018 Dr. Katherine Hall, a lecturer in New Zealand, proposed that Alexander the Great had Guillain-Barré syndrome, an acute autoimmune condition that results in muscle paralysis. In other words, Alexander may have been alive when he was declared dead—a mistake that could have been made when physicians mistook the shallow breathing of a coma patient for no breathing at all. If this was the case, Alexander may have been effectively murdered during embalming—a process that would have seen him disemboweled.

    While we can’t travel back in time to confirm Hall’s theory, it is the only one that takes into account all the details of Alexander’s death—and his body’s mysterious life.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Adaptation