Mobile phones are a poison in our schools, but don't blame teachers

Mobile phones are a poison in our schools, but don't blame teachers

By Frances Childs

PUBLISHED: 17:39 EST, 10 May 2012 | UPDATED: 09:46 EST, 11 May 2012

Holding out my hand I stare into the surly face of a large, angry teenage girl. ‘Give me the phone,’ I say in as calm a voice as I can muster. Truculently, 15-year-old Lisa glares at me. ‘What phone?’ she asks belligerently as she stuffs it back into her bag.

At this point I have a choice. I can demand that she hand the phone over; she will refuse. I can raise my voice and insist; she’ll swear at me. I can give her a detention that she won’t turn up to. Or I can decide not to waste any more lesson time and focus on the majority of the class who really want to learn and accept that, once again, a rude, disruptive child has scored a victory.

I make my decision. Turning my back I attempt to salvage some authority by telling Lisa not to let me see her phone again. ‘What phone is that, Miss?’ she sneers.

Battle: Teachers are facing a very difficult battle against pupils and parents regarding the intereference of the mobile phone

Very few teachers, especially female teachers, want to physically grapple a phone from a teenager’s hand. Girls as well as boys are likely to fly off the handle and no teacher wants to provoke a violent confrontation.

And what member of staff would want to deal with the outraged parental complaint that would inevitably follow?

Forget the old-fashioned notion that a parent might actually back the teacher and berate their brazen child. As well as out-of-control pupils, the beleaguered teacher of today also has to tackle mums and dads to whom discipline is often a dirty word.

Distraction: Parents increasingly expect teachers to be the instigators of discipline

Mobile phones sum up many of the things that are wrong in schools in modern Britain. They have become, quite simply, the scourge of the classroom. That is why many teachers, like myself, will applaud yesterday’s announcement by Sir Michael Wilshaw, the Chief Inspector of Schools, that pupils face a ban on mobile phones in school as part of a new Ofsted crackdown on discipline.

Schools will be penalised for failing to tackle persistent low-level disruption in lessons under a tough new inspection regime being introduced next term.

This could force heads to forbid mobile phone use by pupils â€" including texting, taking calls and surfing the web, often on porn sites â€" to avoid being marked down by inspectors.

Teachers will breathe a sigh of relief at the news, not least because mobile phones are often used to intimidate and bully both children and staff.

When I first began teaching 15 years ago, I had to cope with youngster s chatting during lessons, occasionally being rude to me and the odd fight that would flare up out of nowhere.

By the time I left the profession two years ago, things were even worse. At that point, some children were not only gossiping to each other, interrupting lessons and fighting as they always had done â€" they were also making and receiving calls, texting, and filming each other and members of staff.

Former colleagues who are still teaching tell me that footage of them trying to keep order is played back and waved aloft in order to undermine them. I’ve often heard stories of mocking clips ending up on the internet for the whole world to see.

Once it became possible to surf the web on mobiles, it soon became obvious to me what many of the pupils are looking at. A friend of mine who teaches in a Manchester comprehensive told me that she has to contend with sniggering, foul comments as porn is gloated over in class with little attempt to disguise what is happening. Sometimes a phone is openly passed around. It’s unpleasant and embarrassing.

‘Internet porn that children view on their mobiles in school is a huge problem,’ says Leonie Hodge, founder of Teen Boundaries, an anti-cyber-bullying charity that works with children in schools. ‘Women on these sites are violently assaulted and raped. It’s warping youngsters, especially boys, and making healthy relationships very difficult.’

Scourge of the classroom: Mobile phones sum up much of what is wrong with schools in modern Britain

Given that mobiles cause so much trouble, the question which needs to be asked is, why were they ever allowed in schools in the first place?  As a teacher I never understood why they hadn’t been banned. But colleagues would explain that it would take a brave teacher to run the gauntlet of angry parents who insist their children be contactable at all hours of the day and night.

If the recent experience of my friend Joanne is anything to go by, they were right. She had confiscated one girl’s phone as she had been disrupting her lesson. But she hadn’t even finished packing her bag at the end of the day before the girl’s enraged father turned up demanding his daughter’s mobile be returned.

Joanne patiently explained to him that she had decided to keep the phone until the following day as his daughter refused to turn if off in class, even accepting two calls during the lesson. ‘She was chatting and laughing in my face. I simply can’t have that,’ Joanne told him.

Negative effect: Why were mobile phones ever allowed into schools in the first place?

Instead of apologising and assuring Joanne that he would have a word with his daughter, the father simply ratcheted up the aggression. He threatened Joanne with an official complaint and branded her a thief, before storming from the school.

As a mother myself, I understand that parents feel an extra sense of security when their children have their phones on the way to and from school. But when carried inside school, parents need to realise that phones can actually place their child in danger.

As technology has advanced, mobiles have become status symbols. Now not only do youngsters have to have the right trainers, they have to have the right phone, with all the gadgets.

Name-calling and bullying over children having the ‘wrong,’ phone are rife. Muggings to steal coveted models on the way to and from school are common.

And then there are the attacks on teachers themselves. One of the first attacks I witnessed in school w as a fracas over a phone.

A colleague, Lydia, confiscated a phone from a teenage boy called Jason and was punched and kicked for having the temerity to do so.

This was about seven years ago, before phones had become more common in school bags than pens. Lydia was outraged when Jason got his phone out and started playing with it in the middle of a lesson.

When she demanded he hand it over, Jason grudgingly did so, but when she refused to give it back quickly enough at the end of the lesson, Jason lost his temper and lashed out.

Lydia was left terrified, seriously bruised and shocked at the level of anger directed at her. ‘He just exploded,’ she said.

Jason was permanently excluded â€" something that will have affected his whole future.

Welcome: Sir Michael Wilshaw, the Chief Inspector of Schools, has announced that pupils face a ban on mobiles in school as part of an Ofsted crackdown on discipline

So yes, Sir Michael Wilshaw is absolutely right to target the problem of mobile phones in schools. But he is wrong to focus purely on what teachers and head teachers must do.

Parents are key to the battle. Sometimes I would call them at home and spell out just how disruptive their child’s phone use was. ‘Julie told me to f**ck off when I asked her to put her mobile phone away and concentrate on the lesson,’ I told one mother.

‘Well, the thing is, she’s totally addicted to that phone,’ came her mum’s blithe response.

And I think the reason for attitudes like this is that the toxic influence of the mobile phone isn’t confined to classrooms and teenagers. Former colleagues tell me they have noticed an increasing tendency for mums to turn up at the school gates at primary schools speaking on their phones â€" ignoring the little ones they haven’t seen all day.

‘I see them chatting away â€" they don’t even gi ve their five-year-olds a kiss,’ one teacher in an affluent part of Sussex told me recently. ‘They walk off down the street, the phone still glued to their ear.’

She has even had parents answer calls while they are speaking to her. ‘Once I was talking to a mum about her son’s difficulty in settling into school and she answered a phone call, leaving me standing there. I was amazed,’ she recalls.

The lesson is clear. We can’t just leave this problem to Sir Michael Wilshaw, heads and teachers. If we really want to stop mobile phones blighting our children’s education, parents have to lead the way and reach for the ‘off’ button themselves.

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