Love to see how that's going to be policed in England.

Hopefully it will be something really good, like giving parents a day in court and remove some money, as we all know that's the best way to deal with the scourge of phones in School /Sarcasm.

Joking aside, something with the best of intentions, but not sure how this is going to pan out, from policy, implementation and consequence management.

The issue of productivity has been a problem in the UK for decades. Surely the obvious solution is to mission creep this to the workplace, banning staff from having their phone on them during working hours, or from bringing it into work. Are workplace phone bans common?

Ban meetings and productivity will soar in the office. Meetings are outright explained in an anti nazi WWII manual as a way to make productivity go down.

Um, considering I'm reading this on my phone at work...

This is yet another example of disjointed thinking.

This year the DfE is pushing out the Issuing Education Records service. This is an app that allows a student to access their education record, KS4 exam results will be pushed out to the app at 11am on results day, and the app will collect together their education record as they pass through further and higher education.

All very nice.

To activate the app, the Year 11 kids have to come to my office, I call up their record and they scan a QR code using their mobile phone .

Do you spot a flaw if phones are banned in schools?

>> Do you spot a flaw if phones are banned in schools?

Next up will be an amendment. Fines and criminal records for children using phones. Don't think it won't happen. All it takes is some fascistic hand-wringers in the Daily Fail to put it on the front page.

More than one MP has been caught using a phone in parliament.

I assume your handle uses the same meaning of Truth as Trump's Truth Social...

It depends how they decide to implement the ban part. My preference would be to create accounts that can be accessed from any browser, but if there must b an app, then it would be quite easy to have an exception for signing up for that service while continuing to have phones banned elsewhere. Whether they're smart enough to do that or not, they're likely not going to enforce it heavily if that's the situation where their ban is violated.

What could be a bigger hassle for school ops is whether schools will be required to confiscate and store phones, since students will likely still bring them for use before and after the school day. Currently, most schools I'm aware of allow students to keep them but not to use them during class, but if they have to collect phones every morning, it will require some system for storing them securely and making sure everyone gets the right device in the afternoon which, though possible, is likely to be an annoying exercise for everyone involved. I don't know whether there's a sufficient problem under the "penalties if you take your phone out" policy which justify the stricter one.

The school records service uses an app, like the NHS app, so not a browser based service. Sign up requires scanning a QR code, the QR code expires after 5 minutes, so we can't print them for kids to take off site.

As for logistics, we take phones off kids who are caught using them, they're held in the pastoral department, slotted into one of several hangng shoe racks, the kids come to collect them at the end of school, unless they were a total arsehole about confiscation, then their parent has to collect the phone - the parents usually leave it a few days, just to teach their offspring a lesson.

This system works for us, but other schools' mieage may vary...

Unless they need to sign up every week, it wouldn't be very difficult to arrange a sign up assembly line where students take their phones through, scan the code, then put them in the storage system that's going to be used every day for everyone who brings one. That storage system is going to have to scale much larger now that it's every student with a phone instead of those who misuse them.

I still don't like the idea of putting all of this in a phone-linked app because it makes it hard for any students who don't have a smartphone to see their data, and I don't consider using a parent's an acceptable solution to that. But that's probably not anything you can change, so my displeasure is recorded but unimportant.

"Do you spot a flaw if phones are banned in schools?"

Nope, because they will obviously be allowed to have it at that point because it is needed. It's not like they're going to be arrested if the teacher told them they needed to use it. Although this is a Labour Government and it wouldn't surprise me, I highly doubt it will cause issues in such circumstances in reality.

The current proposal is to ban phones from school sites

Just in time for another dept to introduce a mobile app based system for students to access public transport and school buses (system will be years later and a billion-squillion over budget)

Well that's a bit crap. I mean, how will little Tarquinetta be able to contact Mummy to fire up the Wankpanzer and pick her up from the vape shop?

A great example of democracy. Not.

Not one of them is elected. Not one of them has a mandate from the population. Some of them have bought their seat by giving political 'donations'.

Yet Britain is happy to point fingers at 'oligarchs' and 'juntas' around the world.

Democracy gives you Trump.

You get far worse without democracy.

Like having a monarchy, it makes no sense at all.

However, it's worked very well for a long time so think carefully before changing it. Personally, I'm all for monarchy simply because it works better than a republic.

I'm all in favour of an elected second chamber, so long as every member of that second chamber can demonstrate that they have no connection to any political party whatsoever....

For an example of an elected upper and lower chamber, look to the United States, with theit system that practically guarantees laws will not get passed.

Then Trump rolls in, criticises Obama's use of Executive Orders, then proceeds to rule via Executive Order.

Fucked up doesn't come close...

"Education minister Baroness Smith"

This would be none other than Jacqui Smith, once referred to as Whacky Jacqui on these hallowed pages? Obviously, she hasn't changed.

In theory, I can see the benefits of not having sprogs faffing around with their phones in class . But it's hardly a new problem - in my day, teachers regularly confiscated calculators, catapults and god knows what else we took to school, mobile phones not being a thing in those days.

In reality, it just isn't going to happen. We live in a connected, mobile first world where phones are more or less required. Plus, there is the reassurance for parents that little Johnny is always reachable, and in turn is able to reach them. My neighbour sees her kids off to school every morning, handing out whatever they need for the day, and routinely checks that they have their phones. This big brother nonsense isn't going to sit well with her, or countless other parents.

But, since it's being introduced, would it be too much to ask to extend it to the House if Commons? Get those incompetent seat polishers off their phones and maybe they will do something useful. Then again, maybe not.

and god knows what

In my year 8 class long enough ago the desks still had holes for an ink·well, one of the chaps would light a small fire under the lid of the desk to see how long before the teacher noticed the smoke pouring from the ink·well hole. About five minutes.

He met his Waterloo with the French teacher who was more than old enough to have been a mature SOE agent although her appalling French accent would have given Officer Crabtree a run for his money.

In any case whatever she lacked in sang she more than made up with froid , ignoring the plume of smoke and well past the five minutes the pyromaniac blinked first as the desk itself was catching fire.

Afterwards he gave up incendiarism and sitting down (for a while) only to go on to develop new forms of teacher baiting.

Using cellphones in class seems a bit feeble in comparison.

Baroness Smith was a teacher in the 90s, so she's probably fully aware of what went on in your day.

The quote from her sounded to me like she was setting the ground for the Tories amendment to be overturned in the commons. I believe the government have something a bit more sensible in mind, like allowing lock bags or other technology to prevent the phones being used during the school day whilst still allowing to pupils to keep hold of them.

Do they hand them in on arrival and collect them when they go home? If not, they will have to leave them at home, so no phone for the trip to or from school, which would make them more vulnerable.

Whilst the phones are at school being held, they would have to be held in a secure place, and they will have to ID each phone's user, presumably with a name on a pouch.

Official policies would also require insurance to cover mishaps. If someone breaks in for a serious haul of phones. That's a lot of iMoney.

Does it follow that kids won't be able to use public transport via phone apps to get to and from the school? Or phone their parents to say what time the bus is getting back so they can be collected from the bus stop.

It makes sense that phones must be switched off and left in bags during school time, but some kids need them to actual travel to school.

My children's school using Yondr pouches. The pouch has a similar type of "lock" as a security tag, and as they enter the school they put the phone in the pouch and go to one of many Yondr devices that lock the pouch. The pouch is carried around in their bags all day, and as they leave school they go to the device which allows them to unlock the pouch.

There is severe punishment for anyone caught breaking the phone "ban".

It works really well.

That we never had phones when we attended school.

Something many kids will not have the joy to experience.

by pretending that vast swathes of it don't exist.

One would rather hope that there are allowances in here for special circumstances (both my kids had phone passes last week as I was rather unwell in hospital), and for those times when phones are a perfectly useful learning tool.