00:00So we're going to bring a vote on banning phones from schools in England and the reason we're doing
00:05that is we can see from the Department for Education's own surveys that schools are being
00:09hugely disrupted by kids being on the phone all the time. Teachers hate it, in fact young people
00:14hate it and so we're going to bring about a ban on all phones in schools where you hand your phone
00:19in at the start of the day and you get it back at the end but the government are resisting this.
00:23I honestly don't know why a lot of Labour MPs even think it's a good idea but the Education
00:27Secretary is saying that we don't need it. The truth is schools desperately do need a proper
00:32ban on phones in schools. So I've been pushing for this for a long time, I've been working on
00:35this since 2018 and we did push out statutory guidance which has made things a bit better
00:40but it's not enough. The truth is we needed to go further, we do now have the clear evidence that we
00:44need to go further and that phones are hugely disruptive not just for education but having a
00:49hugely negative effect on the mental health of young people across the developed world and that's
00:54why across the world we're seeing more and more countries going for a phone ban. All over Europe
00:58we're seeing countries doing that. Most of the US states are now on their way to a phone ban and yet
01:02here the government are resisting it and that's why we want to push this to the vote and try and
01:05get a phone ban. So some schools already do have good policies but the problem is that at the
01:09moment only about one in ten secondary schools has the best policy which is an end-to-end ban where
01:14you hand it in at the start of the day and you get it back at the end. A lot of schools still have
01:19policies where oh you can have your phone on you but don't have it out and what you end up with is
01:24the phones get brought out under the desk, the kids are on there, the teacher has to stop the
01:28lesson to try and get them off and the reason why that happens is that you get a small minority of
01:34parents who are very aggressive about wanting to have constant communication with their kids
01:39but the price of that for everyone else is huge amount of disruption in class
01:43at lower educational standards and it's also bad for kids' mental health.
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