By Alex Crowe
Victorian private schools face pressure to ban students from using mobile phones as part of a campaign to curb soaring teen mental health problems, as hundreds of parents join an international movement to keep children off the devices.
The push to extend existing nationwide public-school bans on smartphones comes as parents at more than 100 Victorian schools vow to withhold phones from their children altogether until they reach high school.
Wilf Sweetland is waiting until his son Gus, 10, is in high school before buying him a mobile phone.Credit: Simon Schluter
Heads Up Alliance – an Australian parents’ group that last year successfully petitioned for a ban at Sydney Catholic Schools’ 147 campuses – had pressured more Catholic and independent schools to follow suit.
It urged the National Catholic Education Commission and Independent Schools Australia – which together advocate for almost 3000 schools, including more than 500 in Victoria – to make it a national policy. The existing bans meant phones must be switched off and stored out of sight during school hours.
Lorna Beegan, principal of Strathcona Girls Grammar School at Canterbury in Melbourne’s inner east, said a complete ban was a simplistic response.
While her students’ phone use was restricted during school hours, Beegan said some had access to devices such as watches, laptops and tablets that served the same purpose.
“Banning phones might seem like an easy fix, but it won’t prepare students for the world they’ll encounter outside the school gates,” she said.
Like Strathcona, most non-government schools in Victoria have some restrictions for mobile phones. Some, including Trinity Grammar and Camberwell Girls Grammar, banned them after no-phone trials indicated students’ social interactions improved.
Independent Schools Victoria chief executive Rachel Holthouse said policies depended on parents’ expectations, the students and the school ethos. Some imposed total bans, others locked phones away during school hours and some allowed greater freedom for older students.
She said all schools balanced the potential disruption in class with the educational benefits.
“Phone apps, for example, can have a practical benefit in helping students stay on top of timetables and assignment deadlines,” she said.
Heads Up and another Australian parents’ group, Wait Mate, emerged after the Wait Until 8th and Take the Pledge movements overseas, which encouraged parents to delay giving smartphones to children.
The philosophy was founded on research by New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who argued mental health collapsed for teens at the same time as smartphones proliferated.
Haidt said girls with smartphones were more likely to experience anxiety and depression – due to apps such as Instagram and TikTok – and bullying. He claimed boys don’t play any more due to the attractiveness of violent online games and porn.
Wilf Sweetland, a father from Brighton East, said he had witnessed a bullying trend emerge through phones – including using messaging apps to exclude some children – when his now-teenage son was in primary school.
“It set up this terrible social dynamic where someone decides who is allowed to be in the group,” said Sweetland, who supported delaying smartphone ownership until high school.
“And just created this terrible anxiety and distress amongst lots of kids across the year level.”
Another parent, who spoke to The Age but asked not to be identified to protect their child, said his daughter’s friends had kicked her out of a chat group, then sent messages rating her appearance and personality – and then added her back in to read what had been written.
After contacting Heads Up, Sweetland was inspired to start a more-inclusive WhatsApp group for parents at Brighton east’s Gardenvale Primary, where his youngest – Gus, 10 – was enrolled.
Sweetland stressed the group was not about judging other parents. “It’s more about: we are choosing not to … and there are other people doing the same thing,” he said.
Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools would not say whether it would consider following its Sydney counterpart and ban phones at its more than 290 Victorian schools.
Executive director Edward Simons said technology was “part of a broader imperative to strengthen student engagement in our classrooms”.
“That means taking different approaches to the use of technology throughout our students’ primary and secondary learning journeys based on the best evidence and research available,” he said.
While the dangers of social media were well understood, education experts from the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland said the benefits of school phone bans were not.
After screening more than 1300 studies – none from Australia – the team found four schools showed slight academic improvements after banning phones. However, two found only disadvantaged or low-achieving students benefited. Three studies found phone bans had no impact on academic achievement, the researchers found.
The Victorian Education Department said the mobile phone ban had boosted public school student engagement, improved social interactions, increased physical activity during breaks and reduced incidents of cyberbullying during school hours.
Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll. The state’s Education Department says non-government schools set their own policies when it comes to smart phones.Credit: Joe Armao
Asked if he backed a phone ban at non-government schools, Education Minister Ben Carroll did not respond.
Wait Mate co-founder Amy Friedlander said parents were opting out.
Since launching in June, groups from more than 500 Australian schools had pledged to “hit pause on smartphones until at least high school”, she said. Once 10 people from a school year join, an email invites them to connect.
Wait Mate co-founders Amy Friedlander and Jessica Mendoza-Roth want to help parents delay giving smartphones to their children.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Friedlander said families from 102 Victorian schools had joined, providing “strength in numbers” for those wanting to preserve their kids’ childhoods.
“It isn’t too late – our kids deserve their childhoods back – and the time for change is now,” she said.
A study by the Gonski Institute for Education at UNSW Sydney supported the Victorian Education Department’s assessment, finding children’s access to digital technology and its impacts on learning and wellbeing had become a major concern for educators.
Following a survey of teachers, principals and school support staff from government and non-government schools, the report found 84 per cent believed digital technologies were a growing distraction in class.
UNSW education researcher Verity Firth recently shared the stage with San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas for a talk, The Machines Killing Our Kids.
UNSW education researcher Verity Firth (left) shares the stage with San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas on August 25, 2024.Credit: Festival of Dangerous Ideas
Pointing to a convergence of smartphone use and growing mental illness, Twenge said it was possible to reverse the current trend.
“We can control how we spend our leisure time, and we can help the young people we care about do the same,” Twenge said.
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