Should mobile phones be banned in s

Should mobile phones be banned in schools?
A headteacher says pupil behaviour is better and bullying is down since he barred mobiles in his school. So should others follow suit? Teachers argue for and against

‘Pupils come to school without a coat or without having had any breakfast, but they always have a phone,’ says one teacher. Photograph: Alamy
No – they help independent study
"You'll have someone's eye out with that" used to be the refrain of teachers in my day. In malevolent hands, a pencil, a rubber, even a piece of paper could become a lethal weapon in class, and that's before we got on to compasses and Bunsen burners.
A mobile is the same: a potentially potent tool for learning but strangely feared in a school pupil's hand, where it is assumed to wreak havoc with concentration, unleash cyber bullying and surreptitiously video up teachers' skirts.
But isn't it also madness when schools that cannot afford modern IT facilities ignore the powerful computers in every pupils' pocket?
I was amazed when I visited my old school recently: having remarked how sorry I felt for teachers in the mobile era, several teachers immediately declared how useful they were in class. There's even an acronym for it: BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device. As one teacher has argued in the Guardian, this is the future: students using their trusted devices rather than a machine they leave in school at the end of each day.
Jo Debens, a geography teacher at Priory School, Portsmouth, a comprehensive with a mixed intake, was dashing out to take 30 pupils orienteering when we spoke: her students were testing whether it was easier to use an OS map or a mobile phone's mapping services.
Earlier this year, the school drew up a "mobile device policy" in consultation with students. Mobile phones are allowed in school and used in class at the teacher's discretion, with a clear system of sanctions applied for misuse. Since the policy was introduced, only 1.4% of negative behavioural incidents have been connected with mobiles.
Pupils record homework tasks on their phone's calendar (why do they forget homework diaries but never their textbooks?) and in Debens's geography classes they use the camera function to record things and report back to class. They also use mobile internet for independent research.
"We're always being told as teachers that we should give pupils differentiated learning and personalise it. Now they can," says Debens of using mobiles. "Like anything, it's only useful in the hands of the user. They are not the be-all and end-all. We would have death by Wikipedia if all people were doing was cutting and pasting from them."
"I was very anti phones," admits Nasim Jahangir, a business and economics teacher at Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College, Leicester. Several years ago, however, she incorporated smartphones into lessons as she "learned to teach in a different way" – with an emphasis on independent study. She admits it is probably easier to ensure his A-level classes use phones constructively but she thinks it has improved behaviour. "The whole atmosphere in the class has changed," she says, becoming less adversarial, with students policing themselves over inappropriate phone use.
What about pupils who cannot afford a smartphone? And what about children running up big bills doing school work on their phones? Jahangir ensures his tweeting and mobile phone work is accessible to all on the school's intranet. Debens says her school provides Wi-Fi and portable dongles with Wi-Fi so pupils are not paying for their own study. "We have people who come to school without a coat or without having had any breakfast," she says, "but they always have a phone." Patrick Barkham
Yes – they cause disruption and distress
Mobiles are the curse of the modern age – in restaurants, on trains and, most of all, in schools. Pupils are texting when they should be working; they use social networking sites to bully fellow pupils; and they post pictures of their teachers on YouTube. Ian Fenn, head of Burnage Media Arts College in Manchester, had had enough. "Mobiles rather crept up on education and in our experience it was a nightmare," he says. Fenn has banned pupils from making calls or sending texts on school premises and, according to the Daily Mail, the results in terms of improved behaviour and reduced cyberbullying have been dramatic.
Mobiles in schools is one of many issues over which the Mail obsesses, but that doesn't mean a ban is wrong. Indeed, in May an online poll in the Guardian produced a three-to-one vote in favour of a ban. The poll was prompted by a statement by Sir Michael Wilshaw, the new chief inspector of schools and head of Ofsted, that mobiles in schools were disruptive. When he was head of Mossbourne Academy in Hackney, east London, he banned them and said the decision produced immediate benefits.
Ofsted has supported Fenn's decision, but it admits , despite Wilshaw's views, it has no powers itself to impose a ban. "The is