Diagnose:funk – Smartphone-bans, or not? Fortunately, there’s now a public debate about this in Germany, even in mainstream media outlets like Tagesschau, Heute, and even the Heute Show. What would be the outcome of this debate if a study from England showed that a ban dramatically improved performance by up to two grades¹? The English school authorities have taken action.

British Think Tank Policy Exchange Calls for Smartphone Bans

A study by the conservative British think tank Policy Exchange²– supported by leading psychologist and bestselling author Professor Jonathan Haidt – examined the connection between smartphone use and student performance and the effectiveness of smartphone bans in schools. Policy Exchange invited Jonathan Haidt, also author of the bestseller “The Anxious Generation,” to give a lecture to present this report. [Attention: adjust the video quality in the settings. These can be found in the bottom menu bar of the YT video]

The report’s findings, based on research at primary and secondary schools in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, show that secondary schools with effective mobile phone bans are more than twice as likely to be rated “outstanding” by Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) as schools without.

Children at schools with effective bans achieved results that were 1-2 grades higher than children at schools with more lax policies.

Policy Exchange Report recommends:

1. Headteachers should implement mobile phone bans. To ensure these bans are as effective as possible, it is recommended that phones be handed in at the start of each day or stored in lockers, bags (or similar), or, alternatively, banned from school premises.

2. The government should carefully monitor whether schools are implementing effective phone bans, and if the situation does not improve within a year, the current guidelines should be made legally binding.

3. For Ofsted to incorporate the findings on mobile phones into its education inspection framework and inspector training.

4. For teacher training providers to ensure they incorporate the latest evidence on mobile phones, social media, and mental health into their curricula. This should include teaching effective models for mobile phone bans and their enforcement.

5. For the Children’s Commissioner to use their statutory powers to apply the findings of this report to a much larger number of schools.

6. The Education Endowment Foundation should conduct further research to assess and investigate the impact of effective mobile phone bans on academic performance, student learning, mental health, and bullying.

In February 2024, the Conservative government published detailed guidance and action plans to encourage schools to consistently ban smartphone use in lessons and during recess.

From September 2025, Barnet, North London, will be the first borough in the UK to ban smartphones in all its schools. This regulation affects approximately 60,000 students in 126 primary and secondary schools. Parents are also encouraged to delay giving their children smartphones until at least the age of 14 and to restrict social media use until the age of 16 (Daily Mail, February 15, 2025, Deutsches Schulportal).

New studies confirm the need for guiding smartphone bans

The 2024 Policy Exchange report is confirmed by recent studies. People are losing essential aspects of their intelligence at an ever-increasing rate. Concentrating, thinking logically, solving problems, and processing information – people today are less able to do all of these things than they once were. Studies provide clear evidence of this.³

For example, the “Monitoring the Future” study by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA, documents the growing concentration difficulties of 18-year-old Americans. The “Programme for International Student Assessment” (PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), based in Paris, France, has been measuring the learning abilities of 15-year-olds worldwide for years. All research findings unanimously indicate that young people are increasingly endowed with shortened attention spans and declining critical thinking skills. The OECD study found, among other things, that:

• 28% of adults in the US achieved the lowest levels of literacy in 2023, compared to 19% in 2017.
• 34% achieved the lowest levels of numeracy, an increase of 29% over the same period.

The education ministries of the German federal states and the teachers’ unions should take note of the diverse scientific findings and the causal relationships with digitalization and adopt resolutions for a supervised smartphone ban. Prof. Zierer’s meta-studies on the brain drain effect and smartphone bans have demonstrated the positive effects on learning performance and the school climate. The ban must be the beginning of a pedagogical revolution, as outlined in the appeal of the 75 experts. They call for a move away from “digital education,” which was initiated by the educational-industrial complex to exploit schools as a sales market for their products. The educational shift includes age-appropriate media education that enables young people to use digital devices independently from the age of 16.

More on the appeal of the 75 experts and the educational policy discussion in our series of articles.

How these deficits can be explained neurobiologically is analyzed in two documents:

1. Interview with neurobiologist Dr. Keren Grafen: “It is high time that the negative effects of high-frequency EMF on the brain development of children and adolescents are taken seriously!“
2. Teuchert-Noodt G, Hensinger P (2025): No way out of the smartphone epidemic without taking into account the findings of brain research, J Neurol Neurosci, 16 (01) 2025 : 001-01, PDF.

Source: diagnose:funk, published on March 30, 2025

FOOTNOTES

1. The original article is written in German, has been translated into English by Multerland, via Google Translate, and edited where necessary. Multerland’s Admin was uncertain about the Google translation of the German word “Noten”: Google offered “grades”. Since Multerland’s Admin is Dutch, and only familiar with the Dutch school rating system, it was necessary to check the translation, only possible via a website or page that explains the German rating system on schools. Via the Dutch word “schoolcijfer” and the Wiki explanation of it, the German Wikipedia page “Schulnote” was found, and the same subject is in English: grading. This means that the Google translation is correct, if following the German explanation, since the diagnose:funk article was written for a German audience. ↩︎
2. Policy Exchange is a leading British think tank based in London, founded in 2002. It plays a significant role in the British political landscape, developing policy ideas and reform proposals that are particularly embraced by the Conservative Party.. ↩︎
3. https://t3n.de/news/studien-zeigen-menschen-kognitive-f%C3%A4higkeiten-informationen-verarbeiten-1678313/
   
   https://www.lehrer-news.de/blog-posts/weniger-handys-mehr-leistung-wie-handyverbote-schule-veraendern-koennen?utm_source=chatgpt.com
   
   https://www.gofeminin.de/familie/schule-ohne-handy-verbessert-leistungen-s5516088.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
   
   https://www.chip.de/news/Haben-Kinder-darum-schlechte-Noten-Ein-Handyverbot-kann-helfen_185288462.html ↩︎

SHARE THIS:

• Bluesky