Banning Cellphones: Quick Fix or False Hope?

Schools around the world are cracking down on student cellphones, with many turning to outright bans as a fix for distraction, bullying, or mental health struggles. But as University of Birmingham Professor Vicky Goodyear and Harvard’s Carrie James explain, the story is more complicated than a simple “phones are bad.”

“School phone policies alone are not enough to tackle some of the issues that we're seeing in adolescents,” Goodyear says. In her study of over 1,200 students, she found no differences in mental health, academic performance, or well-being between schools with strict bans and those without. While restrictions cut down on in-school phone use, they didn’t meaningfully reduce students’ overall daily screen time.

“Schools are not the silver bullet for addressing the negative impacts of smartphone and social media use,” Goodyear adds. “We also need to optimize on the benefits that are available as well. And there are also unintended consequences of these bans that we do not yet know.”

As James points out, for many students, cellphones can be an important tool for safety, connection, or learning support.

“Removing the devices doesn't remove some of the challenges that are associated with growing up with technologies, but it can remove some of the benefits of those connections,” James says. “So, this is not to say this is an argument for not having bell-to-bell policies. I think that they can be very, very important in a lot of cases. But it is an argument for being very alert and aware of some of those unintended consequences.”

Both researchers agree schools need phone policies shaped with input from students, families, and teachers — plus opportunities to teach “digital agency,” or how to use technology intentionally and responsibly. In this episode, we explore how the real challenge isn’t keeping phones out of the classroom, but how to prepare young people to thrive in a technology-saturated world.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is The Harvard EdCast.

Cellphones are everywhere, and schools are cracking down. In the U.S., more than 30 states now restrict cellphone use, and schools around the world are following suit. Bans are seen as the fix for inattention, cyberbullying, or mental health struggles. But the reality is more complicated.

Vicky Goodyear, who studies school smartphone policies at the University of Birmingham, and Carrie James, who researches youth technology and well-being at Harvard, say technology's effects on students are far more complex than most people realize. I wanted to explore the growing push to ban cellphones, what research actually shows us, and how schools might balance safety, engagement, and students' digital lives. I started by asking Vicky why these bans are gaining so much momentum.

VICKY GOODYEAR: The first thing to say is that schools are really — and teachers are really working hard to support young people's health and well-being and their overall safety. One thing that's a pattern in young people's lives is phones and social media. And there's a lot of benefits to phones and social media. There are some harms, and there's a lot of panic around that.

In some schools, phones are presenting some challenges. In the UK, the teachers that we work with, they suggest that phones bring some safeguarding issues. They are involved in bullying. They have distractions to learning. And overall, together, bringing worries that it could impact on academic performance.

Coupled with that, there's not too much comprehensive guidance on how teachers can manage phones in schools, particularly in the UK. And so, the worries and the issues are beginning to show patterns that schools are wanting to ban phones in schools as the way forward, ban being a loose term, is that they want to restrict phone use in schools.

JILL ANDERSON: Carrie, do you have the same perception?

CARRIE JAMES: Yeah, I think that Vicky's comments really resonate from what we hear mainly in the US from educators. One thing I'll add is if we think about everything that is on educators' plates in general, like that additional layer of having to enforce or ensure that students are paying attention, and are really there and present for their learning, and phones being a thing that can distract from that.

So, teachers are often in this frustrating position of having to police personal devices in schools. So, bans can be a way of mitigating that additional layer of responsibility that is put on educators' plates so that they can focus on learning.

JILL ANDERSON: So, it sounds like a lot of these bans are being driven by educators inside the buildings rather than maybe research or even public pressure, or even maybe politics.

CARRIE JAMES: I think it's a big driving force here, but I think that we cannot ignore the broader public conversation about adolescents and screens, which Vicky alluded to. There's a little bit of a techno panic around young people, and the adolescent mental health crisis, and the relationship that may exist between digital devices and that adolescent mental health crisis.

In the past couple of years in the US — and I'm not sure if, Vicky, this is happening in the UK as well — but school districts have been suing social media companies for the ways in which their apps may be contributing to the mental health crisis and the kinds of things that they then see in schools and need to cope with. So, I think that broader concern, that public conversation that is concerned about screens and social media, contributes to this energy and momentum around measures that can restrict access. And schools are really a current site where a lot of that is unfolding.

VICKY GOODYEAR: Yeah, I would agree with what Carrie said. And to add to that maybe from what we know about different countries and what they're doing. So, some countries have introduced laws to prohibit phone use in schools. And so, in the UK, there's no law, but there is guidance that was introduced in early 2024 that suggests that all schools should prohibit phones.

Now up until that point, it was the schools' decisions to do that. And when the government in the UK produced that guidance, there was evidence to suggest that 90% of schools already had a prohibited phone policy in place. So, the momentum in the UK is that schools were already self-selecting to prohibit phone use in schools before it became a kind of countrywide policy or law.

JILL ANDERSON: Let's talk a little bit about the research and what we maybe know about the effects of cellphones and cellphone restrictions in schools. Vicky, this is something that you've looked at in your work. What did you find out?

VICKY GOODYEAR: So, at the University of Birmingham, we conducted research into school smartphone policies. We compared the outcomes in adolescents who attended a school with a restricted phone policy compared to a permissive phone policy. So, what we mean by restrictive in this study is that you are not allowed to use them between into the school gates to the end of the school day. And then permissive is that you are allowed to use them either throughout the day, or at breaks and lunchtimes.

We collected data from over 1,200 adolescents across 30 different schools, and what the study found was that there was no difference in outcomes for pupils who attend a school with a phone ban compared to those that don't. And those outcomes were across the areas of mental being, anxiety, and depression, physical activity and sleep, educational outcomes, including attainment in English and maths, and disruptive classroom behavior.

Now, what we did see was that there was a difference in the time adolescents spent on their phones and social media in school. So, school phone policies reduce the amount of time adolescents spend on their phones by 40 minutes on phones and 30 minutes on social media.

What we did also find in that study was that we found that there was a connection between the more time you spend on your phones and the worse outcomes in all of those areas. And so, bringing that together, why perhaps were there no differences in outcomes we might expect there to be? Why was there no difference? 
Well, the overall amount of time adolescents were spending on their phones per day in our study was four to six hours. And on social media, it was two to four. When we looked at the time, that 40 minutes' reduction and that 30-minute reduction was not perhaps enough to make a difference to those overall levels of phone use.

So, what we suggest then is that the school phone policies were not actually disrupting overall phone use, and so perhaps that was not affecting the overall outcomes of mental health, physical health, and educational outcomes. So, when we look at the outcomes of this study, we can suggest then that this tells us that we need to focus on in-school and outside-of-school phone use, and we shouldn't be treating schools in isolation.

Now, just as a caveat, that study is just based on the UK. It's a cross-sectional, observational study, so we can't establish cause and effect. But it does provide some evidence of the direction of what is going on in schools. And when we look at those outcomes, we aren't seeing the difference that perhaps we might expect.

JILL ANDERSON: That's so interesting. So let me make sure I understand this correctly. Teens and students were still using their phones just as long as they would any other day, it sounds like. I don't know if the social media hours-- if it's cumulative, like, for six hours a day, or if it's just four hours, two were on social media.

VICKY GOODYEAR: So yes. When you think about the use over a 24-hour period, the differences between adolescents returning to school with a permissive and a restrictive school was comparative, and it wasn't significantly different overall.

JILL ANDERSON: Carrie, I feel like this connects a lot with the work that you do and what you've seen on research on youth tech and well-being.

CARRIE JAMES: Absolutely. I think what's happening in terms of this debate about phone bans and schools and the uncertainty around the evidence there is mirrored in the broader debate about the relationship between social technologies and youth well-being. And I think it's very controversial in the field of media research. There are researchers on different ends of the spectrum and a lot of debate about how we interpret large-scale data.

The work that we do at the Center for Digital Thriving is pretty qualitative. And so, we spend a lot of time talking with young people about their experiences growing up with technology, young people from different backgrounds growing up in diverse contexts.

And we hear that there's a ton of variability. The relationship between social media, tech, and mental health cannot be boiled down. There's no one-size-fits-all narrative or solution.

Some of the things that we hear are that the relationship between a young person's use of media and their mental health and well-being has a lot to do with not just time on their device, but the kind of activity they're engaged in and the strengths and vulnerabilities they bring to that media engagement. So, there's a lot of variation. It's not just a function of screen time or the amount of time on a particular app. What's hard, and what's actually really positive about those engagements really varies for different kids.

JILL ANDERSON: I feel like we're seeing, especially in the US, a movement to have blanket bans. So, bell-to-bell bans. People are seeing this as a silver bullet, as if taking away phones is going to solve any issue of distraction or anxiety or social media use, which, Vicky, it seems like your research tells us that's not necessarily true.

VICKY GOODYEAR: Schools are not the silver bullet for addressing the negative impacts of smartphone and social media use. We also need to optimize on the benefits that are available as well. And there are also unintended consequences of these bans that we do not yet know. And I think particularly what Carrie was saying that there are individual differences.

And for some young people, phones and social media can be an important refuge, an important resource, an important support mechanism. And so, we need to be really cautious about this.

And the evidence doesn't point towards that bans-- when we look at the outcomes, particularly mental well-being, physical health, and education outcomes, it isn't pointing towards a direction where there is making a substantial positive difference. And so therefore, we need to be cautious. The idea that a blanket ban towards adulthood-- those sorts of approaches are being suggested and used in Australia, for example. We also don't have evidence on that at the moment either to make evidence-informed decisions.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't act and we shouldn't do things. But what we know from the study we've led in the UK is that school phone policies alone are not enough to tackle some of the issues that we're seeing in adolescents, and we're not sure about how they're working alongside the benefits to support young people.

JILL ANDERSON: Carrie, do you think you can talk a little bit about some of those unintended consequences of banning phones that schools maybe just aren't anticipating?

CARRIE JAMES: This really highlights the importance when any kind of device or tech policy is put into place in schools, getting a sense of what some of the impacts are going to be for individual students and their families and their communities. So, a policy that is bell to bell, which means that when students arrive at school, they put their device in some kind of — I think Yondr pouches are very popular. And that device is not accessible to all of the students.

So that may have the benefit in the classroom of all the students being fully present in the sense of not being distracted by buzzes from those devices. But for teens who have significant responsibilities for family members, for example, outside of school, distance from their personal devices can amplify anxiety for them and lead them not to be fully present in the classroom.

I mean, the other thing in echoing what Vicky was saying about bans not being a silver bullet, you put the phone in the Yondr pouch. And yet, teens can be sitting in a classroom ruminating about dynamics with friends and peers that they saw unfolding in their text messages or on social media before they put them in the pouch. And so really, removing the devices doesn't remove some of the challenges that are associated with growing up with technologies, but it can remove some of the benefits of those connections. 
So this is not to say this is an argument for not having bell to bell policies. I think that they can be very, very important in a lot of cases. But it is an argument for being very alert and aware of some of those unintended consequences.

One more thing I'll say is that my daughter goes to a school for neurodiverse youth, and digital devices play a really important role in supporting her learning in the classroom. And so that's through assistive technologies on her Chromebook, for example. And so digital devices are really important. 
But it's also important for her in particular that they do have a bell-to-bell policy with respect to personal devices because of the importance of her supporting in-person social skills. And I know that this is another goal that educators have for students within the school day, is to really support in-person interactions in those social skills. And for neurodiverse youth, in particular, this is essential. And so having some of those policies in place can really create environments where students have to talk with one another and develop those skills that are really important for life.

JILL ANDERSON: We're not saying that blanket bans are necessarily bad. It really depends on the circumstance and what the school wants to achieve, or even the students.

CARRIE JAMES: Or even the students. And I think the most important thing is eyes wide open with respect to implementation. Implementation of policies really matters and doing that in close collaboration and dialogue with students and larger communities feels essential.

JILL ANDERSON: What are some ways schools and communities might approach cellphone use in classrooms?

CARRIE JAMES: In the U.S., I think it's a mixed picture. There are statewide bans happening. And so, in many cases, school districts are being handed down a mandate from the state and then have to figure out how to implement it.

And that doesn't mean, though, that there is no opportunity for a community conversation, and an opportunity for discussion with both students and families. So, I said mixed picture. I think there are a lot of — and maybe they're not so visible, but innovations happening across different districts and even in those states in the US to make sure that student and family voices are at the table as we think about implementation.

So, one of our peer organizations is called Young Futures, and they fund innovations in digital well-being. And they just recently announced their new Call Me Maybe cohort. And it's a cohort of organizations and even school districts who are doing novel work in relationship to phone bans.

So in rural Mississippi, one school district has an initiative where they have students at the lead of ensuring that not only the way in which the phone ban policy plays out is respectful of the needs of individual students, especially in a rural area where they need their devices often to coordinate logistics, getting home, and coordinate with family members, but that there's a way in which those spaces for social skill and social interaction, development, and learning are happening.

And so having students empowered to play those roles and defining what implementation looks like is happening in a variety of places. And there's a lot to learn from there. I don't know that that's creeping into the broader public conversation about phone bans in schools, but it's happening, and I think that that's a promising development.

VICKY GOODYEAR: Yeah. In the UK, in a part of our study, we looked at analyzing the different types of school phone policies. And we looked at several different factors, such as the content of the policies, how they were produced, and who was responsible for that.

And so, one of the things, first-of-all, we found was that most of the policies, when we did our data collection — and this began in 2022 — they'd all been mainly initiated in the last two years. So, there was a significant change towards restricting phone use, particularly after COVID.

In terms of who the policies were created by, it was mainly what we refer to as the senior leadership team. So that's the head teachers or the senior members of staff in the school. None to rarely were pupils consulted or parents, or any of the classroom teachers, or even any of the support staff. So particularly like the receptionist, the administrative staff, the teaching assistants. So, none of those were consulted. It was kind of a top-down approach from that.

And I think what we know from other school policies is that to have an effective policy that has buy-in, that has momentum, it needs to involve all the people surrounding that. And when you then find out some of the rules that we looked at in terms of why the phone policies were introduced, it was often very — they are going to bring harm. They're going to do this, harm to distractions and that sort of thing. But then the school's policies for homework were set up that they need to be using these apps on their phones for homework, so there was a disconnect.

So some of the important things about bringing the communities together so that the community is of a school — the ecosystem of everybody that's in the school — so the pupils, all the staff, including teachers and the senior staff and also the parents — is that you can create something, and it doesn't connect with everybody across the school. And the homework apps are an example in that you have a policy in the school, and then people say, well, why am I not allowed to use an app in the school day on my phone for learning in the classroom, but then I can use it outside of school?

And then the parents will say, well, how can they not use it in school? And then this is affecting them using it when I'm trying to prevent them using screen times outside of school. And then the teachers are challenged with addressing these questions, and you get confusion and uncertainty about what the rules are and what the message is about phones.

And so bringing that together, you just need everybody to hang together and think, OK, well, we're not going to have phones in schools for this reason, and we all agree on it for this reason. And this is when it's good, and this is when we can use it, and you have that open discussion and co-produce it. But if you don't have that, there's disconnections and people are working in different directions.

JILL ANDERSON: I've done some very unofficial research [LAUGHS] on this topic. And I've even heard that students are able to find ways around these very things that we're trying to prevent just by being on computers. They're so tech-savvy that it's almost like the things that everyone's so worried about are still happening on some level.

VICKY GOODYEAR: Yeah. I mean, the examples I can give in the UK — I mean, the Yondr pouches are particularly prominent, but so have been calculators going into those Yondr pouches and so have two phones.

JILL ANDERSON: Oh, no. So, they don't even know what's going in the pouch? It's not even the phone, because you need to have someone to check it then.

VICKY GOODYEAR: Yeah. The majority are going towards the rules, but kids are savvy. So, when there's a will, there's a way. [LAUGHS]

JILL ANDERSON: Hearing this, is there such a thing as an ideal phone policy? Because it just sounds like there is no one size fits all, which you had said at the beginning, Carrie.

CARRIE JAMES: I mean, there's definitely no one size fits all. But there's been some good work in Massachusetts recently to highlight some of the different approaches school districts are taking. So, the Attorney General of Mass, Andrea Joy Campbell, put out a guidebook for school superintendents across Massachusetts that laid out different model phone policies.

On the one hand, bell-to-bell, which is the Yondr pouch situation. They also talk a little bit about the limited use approaches where students can have their phones. They're expected to be away in certain contexts, but they can be brought out in a particular class where maybe an app on the phone is being used for learning. And then the expectation of off and away, which is you can have your device with you, but the expectation is turned off. It's in your backpack. It's not out.

And that's the big drawback of that piece, is that what I referenced earlier in our conversation about educators being on the front lines of having to enforce ensuring that device is off in a way, which lends to the appeal of these bell-to-bell policies. But in the handbook that the attorney general's office shared with superintendents, they do a great job of laying out both the benefits and the drawbacks of each of those paths and then give examples of school districts in Massachusetts that are embodying those policies. So, I think that there are some resources out there for school districts to think with and work with.

Another resource that I recently came across is that both Stanford and NYU have put together a resource for school districts to assess over time how school device policies are unfolding. And so, they provide surveys that can be sent out to families, to students, to classroom teachers, to administrators so that there can be a kind of school or district-wide assessment once a policy is put into place.

JILL ANDERSON: Even if these bans work in the short term, kids are growing up in a world where these devices are everywhere. How do we balance the instinct to restrict phones with this need to teach young people responsible use, digital citizenship?

VICKY GOODYEAR: Yeah, I think certainly, we live in a digital society where technology cuts across many aspects of our lives, and we need to start to think longer term and equip children for long term technology use. And this is something Carrie and I wrote on together.

We kind of focused on thinking about, how might we prepare young people for healthy development? What would that look like? And I suppose it comes back to the unintended consequences. If we aren't preparing, what happens as young people transition from adolescence to adulthood and they move along their lives? And how do we prepare them effectively?

And Carrie could probably speak more to this, but one of the key things we focused on was education. And how might we support young people in schools and across different aspects of their lives to thrive and grow in those environments?

CARRIE JAMES: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. I think wherever a school comes down, or a school district comes down in terms of their device policy, the reality is that parents and teachers, adults need to be supporting young people for a technology-filled world that they live in. If they grab that phone on their way out of school, how do they cope and manage with many of the benefits and the challenges? 
So, at the Center for Digital Thriving, we have thought a lot about this and invested a lot of time in thinking about what agency-building approaches look like for growing up in a technology-filled world. We believe that just pulling the device or preventing youth from engaging with technology at every turn doesn't prepare them for this world.

So, we have thought a lot about what agency looks like in a world of technology. And we define digital agency as having meaningful choice, intentionality, and control over how technology fits into our lives. 
And this is something that all of us want to have. We want to be very intentional about the way we use technologies. We want those uses to be meaningful. We want to feel a sense of control. 
So, a lot of the work that we've done is thinking about, OK, what does digital agency look like for young people? And how can we support that both at home, but also in classrooms? So, we've built a lot of resources that attempt to support different aspects of digital agency, resources related to reflecting on technology habits, device habits. So, creating space in a classroom for youth to think about, A, what habits are really working well for them and what they feel good about, and then B, digital habits they don't feel great about and they want to try to address or change in some way.

So, this kind of conversation can unfold whether personal devices are in the classroom or not, but it can build that sense of agency for what happens outside of school. And so that's what we're going for in a lot of the things that we develop in collaboration with both youth and educators.

JILL ANDERSON: I can see how teachers maybe don't want another thing to deal with, but I also wonder if there's just a missed opportunity here to help kids do what you just said, Carrie. Like, learn how to live in this world with phones.

CARRIE JAMES: Absolutely. And I think in contexts where there is that approach of limited use, I think that that's what can be happening. However, again, what I shared about my daughter and the importance of that bell-to-bell policy in her school, I think that's great and essential for her learning. And at the same time, what I hope is unfolding in the appropriate context within the school day, whether it be health class or advisory, are some learning experiences that really are about what it's like to grow up with social apps, and increasingly generative AI, and really preparing young people with the skills and dispositions to manage those technologies outside of school.

JILL ANDERSON: What would you say are the next things that we need to be thinking about as we move forward with these policies, or even just thinking about cellphones in schools?

VICKY GOODYEAR: From our work in the UK, what it has shown us is that there is a connection between in-school and out-of-school use. And also, well-being is very context-dependent. It's holistic, and there's a lot of variance in that. So, a one-size-fits-all approach, a blanket ban isn't necessarily meeting the outcomes as we know it.

Well-being is still a huge priority in young people, and it always will be, and should be. The challenge is this area is moving at a fast pace, and this world is very different to the childhood experiences of many adults. 
I think what we need to try and challenge ourselves to do is to look beyond bans. There's a lot of expertise in education about how to support young people effectively. There's also a lot we know about mental well-being holistically and how we can support young people holistically. And thinking about technology intersects with that and how we interact.

So, I think what we're looking at next is we're looking at this more holistic approach. So, we've looked at, this is a contemporary thing that's going on. There's a narrative to restrict phone use. And our work suggests that we need to be looking broader, and we need to be doing more than that. And it particularly suggests that we need to look at phone use holistically, and that means across young people's lives. And so, it's about their digital lives and their overall well-being.

So, we'd be looking at something in the future that's looking at, what are the connections between how do parents support and how do schools support? And how can we bring that together to find something that's comprehensive?

And what I think at the moment is not going to be as easy as perhaps a ban is to think, yeah, let's just do that. It's going to be something a bit more holistic and perhaps complex, which actually acknowledges the complexity of phone use and well-being.

CARRIE JAMES: Circling back to the situation that educators are in where they have so much on their plates, we want to really think about how they can be best supported with-- I mentioned a moment ago that it's really important to find space for these kinds of experiences in school that will support young people's digital well-being out of school. But how do educators find time to do that work?

I think another thing that is really important is thinking about the mindsets adults bring to the conversation about young people and technology. Educators have been placed in this position often of being like a tech referee where they have to enforce a policy and try to remove the device from the classroom, really being in policing mode. And sometimes I feel like that as a parent too at home.

But what we've heard from young people is they really need adults in their lives to be more like coaches. And so how can we shift that mindset from being a tech referee to being more of a coach? And then how do we give educators both time and professional development and tools so that they can do that with young people and really fulfill that promise?

JILL ANDERSON: Well, this is such a timely and important conversation. Vicky and Carrie, thank you both for helping us think a little bit more about cellphones in schools, and especially having a little bit more nuance to the conversation.

CARRIE JAMES: Thank you for having us.

VICKY GOODYEAR: Thank you. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JILL ANDERSON: Vicky Goodyear is the professor of Physical Activity, Health and Wellbeing at the University of Birmingham in England. Carrie James is the co-director of the Center for Digital Thriving at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I'm Jill Anderson. This is The Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.