The Stonar Way 7.02.25

A new study published last week, the first of its kind, suggests that banning phones in schools is not linked to pupils getting higher grades or having better mental wellbeing. Students' sleep, classroom behaviour, exercise or how long they spend on their phones overall also seems to be no different for schools with phone bans and those without, the academics found. However, they did find that spending longer on smartphones and social media in general was linked with worse results for all of those measures.

This rather begs the question about responsibility. If school phone bans make little difference, but spending longer on phones does have a negative impact, the obvious conclusion is that most screen time is outside of school hours. Pupil phone use during the school day at Stonar is either zero or is very limited depending on the age of the pupil. The majority of our pupils’ phone-related screen time is at home or in the boarding house. In boarding, we try to ensure that pupils get an appropriate amount of time to use their phones for family and friends contact, whilst also having enough ‘compulsory fun’ activities for our younger boarders to ensure plenty of time away from screens.

In associated news, Tuesday 11 February is Online Safety Day and, across the School, we will be working with the pupils on age-appropriate workshops to support online safety. This week, I had the privilege of spending an hour in the company of a group of our Sixth Form students working together on a PSHE session on Sextortion.

One thing that we all learnt was that Sextortion was a ‘portmanteau’, which is a made-up word coined from a combination of the words. We had some fun thinking of other portmanteau words – brunch, etc. Anyway, the hour was a privilege because the Sixth Formers were mature, knowledgeable, wise and honest in our discussions. I suspect that I learnt more than they did, but we learnt about an important topic that prompted a wider discussion about online safety. To support the findings of the aforementioned study, these were young people enjoying online activity for all the right reasons and who were very aware of, although not immune to, the pitfalls.

Our community is precious and we should never be afraid to model an environment that we believe to be most beneficial for the development of our children. The debate goes on.