Juliet England: How would a ban on mobile phones in schools affect deaf children?

Earlier this summer, education secretary Gavin Williamson announced he was keen to introduce a ban on the use of mobile phones in schools during the working day so that classrooms stayed calm and pupils kept focused as the education sector slowly recovers from the last 18 months.

But what will the impact be on deaf pupils? They have, after all, been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in a way that their hearing peers have not. (Research from the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) found that two thirds of deaf children struggled to understand remote learning. That means thousands have found it hard to keep up at home, before returning to school and battling to lipread masked faces.)

“I want to make the school day mobile-free,” Williamson told journalists last month. “When misused or overused, phones can have a damaging effect on a pupil’s mental health and wellbeing.”

The idea is part of a wider drive to improve classroom discipline across England. Parents and staff are currently being consulted on behavioural management, before the government updates its guidance on the issues involved later in the year.

Clearly, schools have undergone numerous significant changes over the last year and a half, from disrupted learning to the use of face coverings and more.

But the latest proposal has not been universally welcomed by all teaching unions or headteachers, many of whom said the issue was a matter for individual schools to decide for themselves.

The drive to improve behavioural standards, not least in the current circumstances, may seem laudable, and not doubt mobiles have irritated many teachers on numerous occasions.

But, as Mike Hobday, director of campaigns at NDCS said in a letter to the Guardian:

“Far too many (of the major changes) have … little to no consideration of deaf pupils’ needs. This time it’s banning mobile phones in schools. It’s understandable that ministers see them as a problem in class.

“But what about the thousands of deaf pupils who rely on theirs? I doubt the education secretary has plans to provide an alternative to their speech-to-text apps. Can he suggest another way to access information they will miss? And will he introduce new technology to help them socialise at break times if this vital tool is taken away?”

Hobday also stressed in his letter that the needs of deaf pupils had to be included in the big educational decisions of the future. At the moment, he added, “The concerns and questions vastly outnumber the answers”.

The current situation is that it is up to individual schools to decide their policy on how phones are to be used during the school day.

In fact, there are a number of perfectly sensible reasons why deaf children depend on their mobiles during the school day, so that phones are a vital social and educational tool.

Hobday told Limping Chicken: “Mobile phones have become part of everyday life for most people, but particularly for many deaf children. They use them in a variety of ways, such as accessing important information during the school day, looking up things they’ve missed in lessons and communicating with their friends at break times. They’ve become a very important tool and one they would seriously struggle without. Taking this away would hamper those deaf children severely, not least because there’s no guarantee that their phone would be adequately replaced.

“We already hear stories about deaf children going without a radio aid when they need one, or not seeing their teacher of the deaf often enough, meaning they struggle at school. Mobile phones are a readily available tool tailored to their needs. Unless there’s a plan in place to somehow meet these needs in exactly the same way, a blanket mobile phone ban would make things very difficult for those deaf children who use one.”

It’s true that deaf pupils could be considered a special case if and when a ban on devices in school were to be introduced.

But as Hobday adds: “What makes me angry is when blanket policies are announced with no consideration for the needs of deaf pupils, or indeed others with special educational needs and disabilities. Of course there may be an exemption if a phone ban is introduced, but if so, the government should announce this from the start. Deaf pupils cannot be an afterthought.

“Deaf children are already allowed to fall behind at every stage of school, including an entire grade at GCSE, and this gap could get even wider given the difficulties they’ve faced during the pandemic. This is not acceptable.”

When I threw out the question on Facebook, a (mainstream) teacher, Natalie Yolando, said:

“Schools with deaf students will have funding and measures in place to provide them with appropriate tech to help support their learning. The ban on mobile phones is needed.”

Meanwhile someone else, who also said they worked in a school, even asked: “Why would a deaf child need a phone on in class more than any other child?”

On one deaf page, some called for iPads with a live transcribe function as a better option. Angela Pennington described the proposed ban as ‘discrimination against the deaf’.

One deaf parent pointed out that texting was the only way her daughter contact her if she needed to be collected from school unexpectedly – for example, if she was being sent home to isolate under Covid rules.

Lyndsey Hignett, 39, of Warrington, mum to Lucy, 12, who is deaf and a BSL user, says: “My daughter doesn’t use her phone during the school day, although she has access to it if she needs it and has it in the taxi to and from school. I’m not really sure what additional banning there needs to be. I agree that phones can be a distraction during the school day. But, for example, Lucy felt a bit unwell yesterday and I had to drive to her school (70 miles away) to collect her. Because we have tracking on our devices, she could see where I was and this settled her.

“Like the mask situation, deaf children haven’t really been thought about in this. You can’t take a mode of communication away from a deaf child.”

We’d love to know your views on this one. Does your deaf child take a phone into school and what do they use it for? How would the proposed ban affect them?

Photo: Brett Sayles