Principal introducing 12-hour school day to tackle smartphone addiction

A school principal has announced plans to introduce a 12-hour school day in a bid to tackle pupils’ addiction to smartphones.

Pupils at All Saints Catholic College in Notting Hill, London, will be expected to arrive at 7am and stay until 7pm.

They will participate in dodgeball, basketball, art, drama and cookery classes rather than going home straight after classes to spend hours on their phones, Andrew O’Neill told the Times.

He said he had found “some of the most shocking things I have ever seen” on confiscated phones.

Among the worrying messages he found were pupils blackmailing strangers and even engaging in catfishing – where a person pretends to be someone else online to humiliate an unsuspecting victim.

All Saints banned its 900 pupils, aged between 11 and 16, from carrying phones in 2016 but allows the devices to be kept in bags or lockers.

Mr O’Neill, who is a former headteacher of the year and whose school is rated “outstanding” by Britain’s school inspection body Ofsted, said that a number of pupils were falling victim to online crime, including cyberbullying, sexting and blackmail.

He also said pupils were struggling with eye contact and making “real” friends, preferring to game online with strangers, sometimes in foreign countries in the early hours of the morning.

“We have a long-term issue we need to solve,” Mr O’Neill said.

“If we don’t we will have a generational problem with workplaces and society.

“Some children are so apathetic. They don’t care about anything.

“They are buried in their phones.”

The father-of-three said his children were only allowed phones without any social media apps installed.

Mr O’Neill added that he hoped pupils could experience a childhood like he had growing up in Barton, near Darlington, where children played outside, rather than resort to online entertainment.

He added that parents had a responsibility to monitor their children’s smartphone use and keep them safe. A failure to do so should result in action by the social services or even police, he added.

Other schools have been working on measures to limit smartphone use among pupils.

John Wallis School in Ashford, Kent, introduced special pouches to lock devices away all day.

The pouches keep phones sealed until pupils unlock them using a magnetic lock as they leave at the end of the day.

The school reported a 40pc decrease in detentions and a 25 per cent drop in truancy since the scheme started in January.

Increasingly, schools in Ireland are also adopting phone-free policies, with primary schools in Greystones, Co Wicklow, banding together to form a unified stance.

However, there are no rules at national level, with only guidance being issued by the Department of Education on how to manage smartphone use by children and teenagers in schools.

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