England School Phone Ban Costs £20,000 a School. The Funding Isn’t There

A parent on Mumsnet found out this week that her son’s school does not want to take phones in during the day, and does not want to use pouches either. Instead the school is asking every pupil to install an app, Blackout, which locks the phone during school hours and tells the school if anyone opens it. She does not disagree with the idea, she wrote, but it feels “very Big Brother like”. Her plan B, if the app is forced on her son: “I might buy a Nokia and swop sims as plan b.”

The school’s choice is the cheap one, and that is the point. On Monday night the Department for Education announced that the England school phone ban will be strengthened from September 2027. Phones are to be kept “out of use and inaccessible throughout the school day”, going beyond the “not seen, not heard” policies under which a switched-off phone may sit in a bag. The methods it named were lockable pouches, collection at the start of the day, secure storage, or banning phones from the site altogether. Education Secretary Lucy Powell said children should not use smartphones “at any point during the school day, full stop”, and that “school is for learning and friendship, not scrolling”. The announcement said nothing about money.

Union representatives told a Commons Education Select Committee session that school phone ban pouches run from £20,000 to £40,000 per school. England has 3,456 state-funded secondary schools and 3,659,508 secondary pupils, and the two ways of counting the bill land in the same place. At £20,000 to £40,000 a school, putting pouches in every secondary comes to £69 million to £138 million. At £25 a pouch — the price one school charges parents at cost — the same exercise comes to about £91.5 million. More than one in five secondaries already uses pouches, according to Teacher Tapp polling in September. The schools still to convert face something like £54 million to £108 million. Keeping the system running costs another £2,000 to £3,000 a school a year, or £7 million to £10 million annually.

BlueLight Commercial, the national body that buys for policing in England and Wales, holds an open framework for lockable phone pouches, unlocking bases and support services, valued at £60 million over eight years. That is the price of the hardware before a single school has paid a teacher to stand at the gate in the morning.

Parents are already paying. Ormskirk School in Lancashire gave every pupil a phone locker pouch free of charge this year. Its published procedure says that for pupils joining from September 2027, “families will need to purchase a phone locker pouch”. A lost or damaged one must be replaced by the parent at cost price, currently £25. St Joseph’s RC High School in Horwich, Bolton, went further and asked the public: a GoFundMe page to raise £1,300 for pouches at £5 each, after the statutory duty arrived with no funding attached. Its headteacher, Tony McCabe, said there was no government funding available to support schools in implementing a mobile-free environment. At Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls, parents apply to rent a phone locker for the year. At the Trafalgar School, the same rule applies to Yondr pouches: lose one or break it, and the parent pays for the replacement.

The Department for Education’s own survey of school leaders and teachers, published in June, found that 70 per cent of secondary schools still let pupils bring a phone as long as it stays out of sight and unused. That is down only slightly from 75 per cent the year before. The share collecting phones or locking them away has risen from 9 per cent to 21 per cent. Four per cent of secondary leaders told the survey they did not plan to change their policy at all ahead of the statutory change. Only 16 per cent of secondaries have enough lockers for all their pupils. Enforcing whatever policy exists already takes time: 85 per cent of secondary teachers said they spend part of every day on it, most of them under 15 minutes, one in five longer. Ofsted was told in April to check phone policies at every inspection; a Tes investigation found fewer than 2 per cent of inspections mention them, and none of those mentions calls it a problem.

None of this is new law. The current mobile phones in schools guidance, in force since 29 June under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, already expects pupils to have no access to their phones throughout the school day. What changes in September 2027 is the method: the headteacher’s choice to leave a phone switched off in a bag is being taken away, and the replacement has to be bought. The September 2027 review was promised in the House of Lords while the Bill was passing, by the minister Baroness Smith, which makes Monday’s announcement the delivery of a promise rather than a new policy. In April, a minister had said the problem of phones in schools was “already solved”. The Education Select Committee wrote to the Chancellor in September, before the Budget, to say schools “should not be expected to bear the cost of implementing stricter policies themselves” and that the government “must provide dedicated, additional funding”. Asked in Parliament a year ago what the bans cost schools, the department answered that it did not hold that information.

ItalianoSl, another parent on the thread, asked why the school was not doing “what very many school do now, and store them (securely) during the day”. Her own answer: “They dont want to take them in during the day or use pouches or other physical way. They just want this app, it wasnt worded as optional.” A third wrote that she would “choose discipline and consequences over an app every day”, adding: “Its ironic that the solution to educate them about phone usage is via an app required by school.” The thread’s original poster was told by other parents that children are already talking about carrying a second phone, so the app would change nothing. On Instagram, a parent put the double standard in one line, wondering how her child “cannot use a phone in a phone-free school all while the administration posts pictures of the kids on instagram throughout the school day”.

Angela DeSimone, a parent of three children at three different schools in the United States, wrote in a Facebook parents’ group that one school’s Yondr pouches cause “long line back ups when going into school each morning”. Anna Parker, another parent in the group, keeps her daughter’s phone on her person, on silent. The girl, she wrote, “did use it to text me twice when there was an emergency at school”, and the school’s alert “didn’t come out until WAY after the fact”. A teacher in the same thread, Meka Kelly, wrote that pupils “know how to jail break the pouch with a paper clip”, adding: “My students showed me how to do it in exactly 2 minutes.” The emergency argument runs both ways in the thread, with one parent insisting phones “are not helpful in dangerous situations” because they can give away a child’s location, and another asking what a phone is supposed to do during a shooting. Nobody in the thread mentioned who pays for the pouches.

A University of Birmingham study of 1,227 pupils across 30 English secondary schools, published in February, found that pupils at schools with restrictive policies spent less time on their phones during school hours. It found no clear difference in overall mental wellbeing, or in total phone and social-media time. A University of the West of England study found pupils getting around “off and in bags” rules by using phones in toilets, under tables, through earbuds and smartwatches, by hiding a phone on the premises or switching it to silent. The Department for Education’s own polling found that only 16 per cent of secondary pupils say phone rules are followed all of the time.

At Ormskirk, a pupil who says they have no phone is checked with a handheld metal-detecting wand, and issued a day pass to keep in their pouch. A phone found outside its pouch is confiscated until 15:15 the following school day, and a pupil caught with two phones loses both. If a parent needs to reach a child, the message goes through the school switchboard.