School smartphone bans save time but don’t improve student mental health, study finds

Restricting smartphone use in secondary schools may save staff time and money, but it does not appear to meaningfully improve pupils’ quality of life or mental well-being, according to a study published in BMJ Mental Health.

Schools around the world are increasingly restricting phone use. The hope is that limiting access to smartphones during the school day will reduce distractions, improve behavior, protect students from online harms, and support learning. Some schools ban phones from the premises, while others require students to keep them switched off in bags, lockers, or pouches.

However, the evidence behind these policies remains mixed. Previous research has suggested that restrictive policies may reduce phone and social media use during school hours. However, broader benefits for mental health, physical activity, sleep, and academic outcomes have been harder to demonstrate.

To investigate this, a team led by Samuel J. Perry of the University of Birmingham conducted an economic evaluation of school smartphone policies in England. The study included 815 students aged 12 to 15 from 20 secondary schools in the main complete-case analysis. Thirteen schools had restrictive policies, meaning recreational phone use was not permitted during the school day, while seven had permissive policies, meaning recreational use was allowed at certain times or in certain places.

The researchers estimated costs from the school’s perspective. This meant they focused mainly on staff time spent implementing and enforcing phone rules, such as monitoring behavior, recording incidents, contacting parents, applying sanctions, and speaking with pupils. They then converted this time into costs using staff salary estimates.

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Pupil outcomes were measured using two health economics measures. One was quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), which combine quality and length of life. The other was mental well-being adjusted life years (MWALYs), which focus specifically on mental well-being.

The findings were striking in two ways. First, there was little difference in pupil outcomes. Compared with permissive schools, restrictive schools had a very small estimated gain in QALYs and a very small estimated loss in MWALYs. Both estimates were uncertain and close to zero, meaning the study did not provide strong evidence that restrictive policies improved or harmed pupil well-being.

Second, both types of schools spent a large amount of staff time managing phones. In restrictive schools, this amounted to about 3.1 full-time staff equivalents across a school year. In permissive schools, it was about 3.3 full-time staff equivalents. The researchers noted that while staff in restrictive schools appeared to spend less time monitoring phone-related activities and completing administrative duties, they spent more time applying behavioral sanctions for breaches of the phone policy, such as detentions and parent communication.

Restrictive policies were estimated to cost £94 less per pupil per school year, though this estimate was also uncertain. At commonly used cost-effectiveness thresholds, the researchers estimated that restrictive policies had about a 90% probability of being cost-effective when QALYs were used as the outcome. The probability was closer to 50-60% when using MWALYs.

“There are unlikely to be differences in pupils’ mental health and well-being outcomes in adolescents attending schools with a restrictive or permissive smartphone policy,” Perry and colleagues summarized. “Restrictive phone policies could offer small economic benefits to schools by reducing the amount of time school staff spend managing pupil phone-related behaviors.”

Some caveats are to be noted. For instance, the study was observational, meaning it did not track schools before and after they enacted restrictive policies, so it cannot prove that the policies caused the cost differences. Also, cost estimates relied heavily on reports from one senior staff member per school, which may not perfectly capture what staff actually do day-to-day. Finally, outcome data were limited to one or two assessment periods, which were assumed to approximate the school year, challenging the internal validity of the study.

The study, “Health economics analysis of restrictive school smartphone policies in secondary schools in England (SMART Schools),” was authored by Samuel J. Perry, Victoria A. Goodyear, Miranda Pallan, Peymane Adab, Sally Fenton, Maria Michail, Paul Patterson, Amie Randhawa, Alice J. Sitch, Matthew Wade, and Hareth Al-Janabi.