Any policy on mobile phones in schools will have to be implemented in collaboration with students and parents, the director of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals has said.
Paul Crone was responding to reports that Minister for Education Norma Foley plans to ask second-level schools to ban the use of mobile phones by students during the school day.
“We need to teach responsible use. We need to teach restraint,” he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.
“We need to teach managing skills in line with the key skills of the junior cycle. Managing yourself, working with others, collaboration, communication, critical thinking. All of the key skills of the Junior Cert that will prepare them for university and prepare them for life,” Mr Crone said.
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“We can’t be naive enough to think that they’re not going to have a mobile phone. We can put in strong policies and procedures and structures that will mean that it’s not used in school time, and that’s done in partnership and collaboration with the students and parents.”
Ms Foley said on Wednesday that great progress had been made by primary schools and parents’ associations in making childhood “smartphone-free” by introducing voluntary bans outside school time in recent years.
Ms Foley said it was now time to establish a “culture of non-acceptance” of mobile phones at second level schools.
Mr Crone cautioned that “policy doesn’t happen overnight, but the beauty of it is that all second-level schools would have a strong policy in place over many, many years. So to highlight that policy and review that policy and bring it to the top of the agenda again is positive. We won’t be starting from scratch because every school will have a strong policy”.
“To be fair to the Minister, I think, what she’s trying to do is to work with schools and to try and encourage and support schools. And if I go back many, many years ago before we had the ICT [information and communications technology] grant, many schools were trying to embark on our digital journey. So they had policies of what they called BYOD – bring your own device. So students brought an iPad or a laptop and many students brought a mobile phone.
“Now we have the ICT grant. So schools are in a position to put the infrastructure in place, potentially purchase devices. Parents are purchasing devices. So the key support that we as school leaders and principals would see is that we have a confirmation of the continuation of the ICT grant to allow us to continue on that journey.
“And that will in itself negate even the need for the teacher to say: pull out your mobile phone just to research this, that idea that they would have the necessary resources in the school. So that would be something that would be very strong, that would support schools in this removal of the mobile phone from our school.”
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