If Phones Are Dangerous Enough to Ban, They Are Important Enough to Teach

11 Jan

Why phone bans alone won’t protect young people - and what schools should do instead

Across the UK, more schools are moving towards full smartphone bans. The reasons are understandable: distraction, online harm, bullying, image-sharing, mental health concerns, fractured attention. No teacher working today needs convincing that something has changed. Many schools are making these decisions under intense pressure, with limited support and no clear national framework.

But here’s the uncomfortable question we need to ask:

If something is so powerful that a school feels the need to ban it,
why would we choose not to teach it?

This is not an argument for unlimited phone use. It is an argument against confusing control with education.

Banning the Problem Doesn’t Teach the Skill

Schools exist to prepare young people for the world they are entering, not the world we wish still existed.

Smartphones are not a passing fad. They are not optional. They are not going away at 16, 18, or after GCSEs. They shape how young people form identity, relationships, ambition, humour, shame, and self-worth.

When schools respond to this by removing phones entirely, one message is often unintentionally sent:

“This world is too dangerous for us to help you navigate.”

That message matters.

Research consistently shows that risk avoidance alone does not build resilience or judgement. Young people don’t become safer by being shielded indefinitely; they become safer by learning how risk works, how pressure operates, and how to interpret what they are seeing.

The question is not whether phones cause harm.
The question is who teaches young people how that harm works.

What the Evidence Actually Shows (And What It Doesn’t)

Much of the debate around phone bans leans on correlations between smartphone use and rising anxiety, depression, sleep disruption, and attention difficulties.

These correlations are real.
But correlation is not explanation.

Researchers such as danah boyd and Sonia Livingstone have long warned against treating digital life as a simple causal agent. Online environments amplify pressures that already exist: comparison, visibility, peer judgement, and exclusion. Removing the device does not remove the environment.

Other strands of research help explain what’s actually happening:

Developmental psychology (e.g. Steinberg, Eccles) shows adolescence is uniquely sensitive to social evaluation and reward.
Shame and emotion regulation research (Scheff, Gross, Eisenberger) shows that visibility + misreading leads to emotional withdrawal.
Sociological work on youth culture (Willis, Skeggs, Reay) shows how “coolness”, performance and anti-effort norms form under pressure.
Critical race and education research (Gillborn, Arday) shows how visibility and misinterpretation fall unevenly on racialised students.

Phones didn’t create these dynamics.
They accelerated them.

Why Bans Can Make the Underlying Problem Worse

From my own research and youth work (summarised in my book Raised by Algorithms and underlying ABR framework), three forces now interact in schools:

Algorithmic pressure - young people absorb messages about status, desirability and success faster than adults can help them interpret.
Emotional self-protection - when visibility is risky, young people narrow expression and hide uncertainty.
Relational rupture - when adults can’t read youth culture, trust thins and guidance stops landing.

In this context, bans can backfire in three ways:

They deepen the cultural gap
Digital life becomes something adults “don’t get” and young people don’t explain.
They displace, not reduce, harm
The same dynamics reappear after school, online, unsupervised, uninterpreted.
They outsource responsibility
Schools signal that digital culture sits outside their educational remit.

Young people don’t stop being shaped by phones because schools ban them.
They just stop being helped while it happens.

What About Safeguarding, Filming and Consent?

One of the strongest arguments in favour of phone bans is safeguarding.

Schools are rightly concerned about:

pupils filming peers in vulnerable moments
recording fights, humiliations or distress
covertly filming staff
images or videos being shared beyond their original context

These risks are real. They are not hypothetical. And they demand serious response.

However, this is precisely where bans alone fall short.

Filming is not just a technical act. It is a moral act that involves power, consent, interpretation and consequence. When young people are not taught how recording changes responsibility, harm escalates quickly.

Research into shame, social pain and online amplification shows that being filmed often causes more lasting harm than the original incident itself. Yet many young people do not fully grasp this until after damage is done.

When schools rely solely on prohibition, three things happen:

filming does not stop - it moves out of sight
incidents become harder to detect and intervene in early
young people learn that the rule matters more than the impact

A safeguarding response that does not include education risks leaving pupils digitally powerful but ethically underprepared.

Teaching digital literacy is therefore not a soft alternative to safeguarding.
It is a fundamental safeguarding strategy.

Schools that explicitly teach:

consent in recording
the difference between witnessing and exploiting
how algorithms reward humiliation
the legal and relational consequences of sharing

are not being permissive.

They are preventing harm before it happens.

In a world where every pupil carries a camera, safeguarding cannot rely on removal alone. It must include understanding.

Teaching Digital Literacy Is Not a Soft Option

Digital literacy is often treated as an add-on: assemblies, safeguarding slides, once-a-year PSHE sessions. That is nowhere near enough.

What young people need is interpretive literacy, not just safety rules.

They need help understanding:

how algorithms reward outrage, beauty, humiliation and certainty
why “going viral” changes behaviour
how shame spreads faster than truth
why effort can feel embarrassing online
why confidence is often performance, not reality
how images lie without technically being false

This is not about teaching apps.
It is about teaching meaning.

And crucially:
schools are the only institutions with the authority and continuity to do this well.

This is not a call for schools to “open the gates” and hope for the best.
Structure matters. Boundaries matter. Adults remain responsible.

But there is a difference between removing a risk and teaching how to manage it.
One is faster. The other lasts longer.

Some restrictions may be necessary.
The question is what comes alongside them.

What About Phones in Clubs and Enrichment Spaces?

One overlooked question in this debate is where young people actually learn how to function with a phone.

If all learning happens in phone-free environments, young people may become compliant in school, but unprepared for life beyond it.

Clubs, enrichment spaces and youth programmes offer a different opportunity. They are environments where:

phones are present but not central
relationships are physically present
attention must be negotiated, not enforced

In these spaces, young people can learn:

when a phone is a tool
when it is a distraction
when it is disrespectful
and when it should be put away without being confiscated

This mirrors the reality of adult life far more closely than total removal.

If young people only learn to concentrate when phones are banned, they are not learning self-regulation. They are learning dependency on control.

Education should not just teach young people how to behave without temptation.
They must also teach how to function with it.

A More Honest Middle Ground

A smarter approach looks like this:

Clear boundaries during learning time
Limits, restrictions, phone-free lessons - all valid.
Explicit teaching about digital environments
Not moralising. Not scare tactics. Analysis.
Adults becoming culturally fluent
Not copying slang. Understanding pressure.
Spaces where young people can talk without punishment
Where confusion isn’t treated as misconduct.

This is harder than banning.
But education has never been about the easiest option.

What Schools Are For

If schools retreat from the hardest parts of the modern world, young people are left to learn alone from systems that do not care about their wellbeing.

If something is dangerous enough to ban,
it is important enough to teach.

Phones are not the enemy.
Ignorance is.

And schools, more than any other institution, are still our best chance to get this right.

In my view, the biggest safeguarding failure of the next decade won’t be that schools banned phones. It’ll be that young people learned how to record before they learned how to care.