From magnetic locking pouches and blocked Wi-Fi access to outright bans and legislation, schools around the world have been waging war on cellphone use for years.
In Canada, too, several provinces have introduced cellphone bans for the 2024-25 school year. The bans vary by jurisdiction, but they all have a similar aim: to restrict cellphone use in classrooms to cut down on distractions and encourage safe social media use.
But as the bans gain global momentum — along with confusion about how they will be enforced and criticism about lack of consistency — some researchers say there isn’t enough evidence on whether they’re actually effective.
“Politicians seem to say, as a very easy, nice slogan, ‘Ban the phones. Stop the phones.’ It’s catchy,” said Marilyn Campbell, a professor in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia who studies cellphone bans in schools.
But there’s very little actual research on whether prohibiting cellphones improves certain parameters, such as cyberbullying rates, student mental health, distraction and academic performance, Campbell told CBC News. And even when there is good research, the evidence is conflicting, she said.
Students going back to school next week will see new rules around cellphones. The province earlier mandated all 60 school districts to restrict cellphone use in classrooms. As Pinki Wong explains, the move is intended to cut down on distractions and encourage safe social media use.
“We don’t know that it’s beneficial, and we don’t know that it’s detrimental. We don’t have enough research to say one or the other,” Campbell said. “My position is that, as we don’t know, why does government insist all schools ban them?”
Across the globe, particularly in the past two years or so, different jurisdictions have announced all different kinds of cellphone bans in the classroom, said Sachin Maharaj, an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa who also studies school cellphone bans.
The impacts haven’t been studied vigorously in most places until very recently, he said in an interview. While the schools that ban phones tend to show improved academic outcomes in those few studies, it’s not uniform, Maharaj said.
“The academic benefits tend to confer most among those students who were the lowest achieving, which sort of makes sense because probably the students who were the most distracted by phones were the ones who were doing worse in school,” he said.
What bans look like around the world
There are cellphone bans in countries around the world, most of them implemented regionally. The list of countries with bans and regions within them is constantly growing and changing. For instance, over the summer, Cyprus and the Netherlands announced a ban in schools, as did several Canadian provinces and a handful of U.S. states and districts.
In 2023, UNESCO called for schools around the world to ban cellphone use in classrooms. The United Nations education agency cited research linking their use with distraction and poorer academic performance. At the time, it noted that about one in four countries across the globe banned cellphones in classrooms and that bans are more common in Asia.
It also suggested that in schools where cellphones are prohibited, students are significantly less likely to be distracted during lessons.
Some of the countries with bans include France, which has blocked cellphones in classrooms since 2018; Italy, where an original ban was announced in 2007 and extended last winter; Spain, where the types of bans vary by region; and Australia, where cellphones are prohibited in all state schools, but how the ban is enforced varies by state, territory and grade.
In 2021, children in China were banned from bringing cellphones to school without written parental consent. In Cyprus, the new ban will stop students from turning their phones on but not from bringing them to school. The new Dutch ban, like many others, leaves schools to come up with their own plans to enforce the rules.
Last February, England announced its own ban and distributed guidance on prohibiting phone use to schools around the country to create consistency, although it noted that the guidance was “non-statutory.” Many schools already had policies in place for years, but they varied.
In some U.S. schools, students check their phones into storage containers before entering a classroom. Picture an over-the-door shoe organizer, but each pocket holds a device.
And in some districts, students put their phones in magnetic “locking bags,” making it physically impossible for them to access their phones. Vox reports that school districts in at least 41 states have bought the pouches in recent years. According to the The Associated Press, the pouches don’t unlock until the final bell rings.
Quebec has joined Ontario in banning cellphones in the classroom. But are the devices really a distraction for kids, or is that argument flawed? The National’s Ian Hanomansing breaks down issues with a parent and teacher on both sides of the debate.
‘Hard to paint an overall picture’
As the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment noted in 2022, most schools globally have some kind of rule regarding the use of digital devices, but they vary drastically. The most common approach in all schools in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries worldwide at the time was for individual teachers to establish rules for their own classrooms.
Because the research on cellphone bans to date is often conflicting or shows different effects on different students, it’s “hard to paint an overall picture” on the impact, said the University of Ottawa’s Maharaj.
For instance, a 2024 study out of Norway found that schools with phone bans experienced an increase in learning among girls especially, and this effect was greater at schools with stricter bans. But another study looking at schools in England with cellphone policies saw academic increases among the most disadvantaged and lowest-achieving students — and these were associated with less strict bans.
Still, “on the whole, I think, from a system level, we would expect that overall with students as a whole, that academic achievement will tend to improve,” Maharaj said.
Saskatchewan students will be barred from using cellphones during class in K-12 schools. Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill announced the change earlier this week. Responses have been mixed.
In her review of the current global research on cellphone bans, Queensland University’s Campbell found “an absence of randomized controlled trials with evidence resting on a small number of studies with different designs,” among other issues. This made the reconciliation of any findings challenging, she said in her paper published earlier this month.
“Findings were nuanced and complex,” she wrote, and showed “little to no conclusive evidence that ‘one-size-fits-all’ mobile phone bans in schools resulted in improved academic outcomes, mental health and well-being and reduced cyberbullying.”
Expert calls for communication, not bans
Young people have more self-awareness about their screen time than people give them credit for, said Kara Brisson-Boivin, director of research at MediaSmarts, a Canadian digital media literacy advocacy group.
However, when screen time is framed as an addiction — which Brisson-Boivin said is problematic because it teaches children to feel shame and even hide their media use — bans might seem like the natural response, she told CBC News. Yet it’s completely incongruent with how we live our lives, she said.
“It’s frankly unrealistic and sends a very mixed message to people, because on the one hand we’re saying we’re banning devices, but on the other hand we’re saying apply for a job, which happens to be online,” Brisson-Boivin said.
Educators and parents should be teaching children healthy digital media habits instead of simply cutting them off from access, which is sending a message of powerlessness to a generation of young people, she said.
“I think it is really problematic and will have a backfire effect insofar as them engaging in the sort of closeted social media use where they are experiencing all of those same online challenges, but in isolation.”
A provincewide directive for cellphones in the classroom begins in September. Elementary school students will have to put away their phones for the day. Junior high and high school students will be able to use them at lunch and recess but not during classes. As Jean Laroche reports, schools will be able to set their own rules.