The children’s commissioner wants to use her statutory powers to “check every school in the country to see who is and isn’t” banning mobile phones.
Dame Rachel de Souza, a former headteacher, said there currently isn’t a “clear picture” on how many schools already stop pupils using their devices, but her gut feeling “is that most do restrict mobile phone use”.
It follows the Department for Education publishing non-statutory guidance on managing the use of mobile phones this week.
de Souza told the education committee: “One of the pieces of work I’d like to do is actually to check, to actually use my statutory powers, to check every school in the country to see who is and who isn’t, to understand that, because I don’t think we’ve got a clear picture.”
