Do Cell Phone Bans Help Students at School?

Schools across Canada are experimenting with cell phone bans to help reduce distractions in the classroom and encourage good habits.

From Montreal to Alberta, schools require students to lock up their phones at the beginning of the day or keep them turned off during classroom lessons. Some teachers have tried to encourage phone use during lessons to help supplement instruction, but a school in Victoria ended up banning phones after the accommodation didn’t work out.

“We found for the academic benefit we’re getting [is] outweighed by the negative,” Central Middle School principal Topher Macintosh told All Points West host Robyn Burns.

But for some students, cell phones are a lifeline to the outside world—including parents and counsellors. One parent in Ontario told CBC News that his daughter communicated with him on her cell phone when she was bullied at a new school. The student had permission to FaceTime her father and felt mentally and physically safer. 

The parent told CBC News that “having access to her cellphone was a sort of lifeline because she was able to message myself or mom, and we could then attend the school and extract her from situations where she felt unsafe.”

Why are schools contemplating cell phone bans?

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Schools that have banned cell phones have found remarkable results. Tulane Pierce, a school counsellor at Chatelech Secondary School in British Columbia, told CBC the school is seeing “improved mental health, we’re seeing decreased bullying, we’re seeing more engagement in class, we’re seeing more social interaction.”

Even with that success, Ontario is the only province in Canada with a ban on cell phones in the classrooms; Quebec, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia did not get implement similar proposals.

“I think that when students face this constant distraction from their phones, it reduces their ability to [think deeply, focus, and listen],” Sachin Maharaj, an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy, and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa, told CBC. 

Still, many schools are not implementing or enforcing bans. One student in an Ontario school with a cell phone ban said, “Everyone who has a cellphone brings it and uses it whenever they want in class.”

The question for schools moving forward is whether to work with phones (and allow students to use them during class for research and educational purposes) or to enforce an all-encompassing ban that includes adults in the school.

Some students say they’d be in favour of a ban. Maharaj, from the University of Ottawa, agrees with removing phones from the classroom: “As a society, we need to be able to carve out at least some space where teens can exist sort of free from all of that distraction, and I think schools should be one of those places.”