Everywhere I go that day people talk about the transformation as if they had discovered a miracle drug or a religious cure: just look, they say, at these children — they have come alive! I know teenagers — I have a couple — and it is true there is something uncanny going on in the John Wallis Academy, a large state school in Ashford, Kent, at breaktime.
An animal behaviourist would observe none of the quiet and lumpen huddling over phones of the modern species of teen. Instead kids run in fizzing, cub-like loops around me, make a loud chattering noise, and — this is noted by all as unprecedented — flock in big groups of 10 or 12, forming circles with an antic energy in contrast to what came before: two or three faces gathered around a screen.
Since January this school has managed to ban mobile phones, not just the “phoney” (irony noted) ban attempted by most British schools. The consequences have been dramatic, instant and surprising.
The head, Damian McBeath, did it using a lockable pouch that was first invented for concert audiences but has in the past half-decade become a multimillion-dollar business in American education, used by more than one million students. The pouch idea is gaining popularity now in British schools, and McBeath’s team are so evangelical they want to start a national movement.
“So many schools say they’ve got a phone ban and they don’t,” says McBeath, who went last month to talk to officials at the Department for Education. “We’ve become like missionaries.”
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Three weeks into the pouch regime, in late January, McBeath noticed students rushing from the canteen at breaktime. Trouble, said his teacher’s spidey-sense, as he grabbed his coat.
“They were all outside, mouths open, catching snow,” McBeath told me. Snow had of course fallen on the playground before, but it could have gone unnoticed. The children had sloped off to a hidden corner to illicitly access their phones. A huge and unmeasured metric of schools without phones is how much less time children spend in toilet cubicles.
“Or they would have got their phones out to film themselves in the snow,” says McBeath, shaking his head and smiling. “What was strange was to see them actually enjoying the snow.”
Throughout my day at John Wallis many stories like this make me wonder if adults are getting caught up in nostalgia for their childhoods, just as my grandparents wanted me to tickle trout instead of watching TV.
And then a chance comment will jolt me awake, in disbelief how we have allowed phones in education at all. One 15-year-old girl told me that she thinks she will now do better in her GCSEs, “because before I would just google the answer under the desk, I didn’t really understand anything.” Oh, that’ll be it.
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I arrive at the modern campus for 1,400 students at 8am, to meet McBeath and witness the ritual phone sealing. I then talk to teachers as they “spot check” the children’s phone pouches in class, and finally talk to the teenagers. The students’ views on phone deprivation are the most contradictory: relieved and frustrated.
“We are that new generation who are addicted to their phones,” Zac, aged 16, told me, giving harsh emphasis to the word “addicted”. “It’s quite scary actually.”
First the students throng through the gates, fresh from sleep, and almost automatically put their phones to bed in something like a pencil case made of rubber. Small queues form around the locking stations on the building walls, these lock the pouches magnetically using a device similar to anti-theft tags in clothes shops.
If a phone (or smart watch) is seen or heard after this point it is confiscated until the parent picks it up in school hours. “Parents now say, ‘Oh I’ll leave it a week’,” McBeath says. Before they enter class they pass through a “welcome” by McBeath and colleagues, where they must show their phone locked in the pouch.
“Like so many schools, we did have a phone ban in place,” McBeath says. “They had to have phones off and out of sight, but it felt like whack-a-mole, trying to enforce it.”
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McBeath wanted “a flat-out no phones” ban, as used in a small minority of British schools. But governors and parents “were lukewarm”, arguing that phones are now necessary to navigate transport and after-school logistics.
A friend who went to a comedy gig at the O2 Arena told McBeath about Yondr pouches. They were invented by Graham Dugoni, who, after seeing a concert ruined by phones, began selling his pouches door to door in San Francisco in 2014.
The market Dugoni did not anticipate was schools, which have outpaced his original customers. The United States government records show over the past eight years American schools have spent $2.5 million on Yondr pouches; Yondr is used by 3,000 schools in 21 countries. McBeath’s decision was made, the school paid £25 a head for the pouches and the autumn was spent on information evenings and school readiness.
“That first morning of term in January we had nine students who said they wouldn’t put their phones in pouches,” McBeath says. “By the time I went down to speak to explain to them, four had changed their minds. It was like a Les Misérables moment, they’re on the barricades, and the people didn’t come with them. We now have about 98 per cent of students with phones locked in a pouch.”
McBeath takes me on a phone inspection sweep of classrooms, where he wants me to meet a girl, aged 14, who was a key refusenik on day one. Her reasoning surprised me: she was most concerned about texting her mother.
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“I used to text my mum every day, three or four times,” she told me. Mostly, she was asking for advice, or warning her mother of a poor grade or detention. Now what happens? “I have to wait, to sit down and talk to her face to face.” How is that different?
“It’s much better,” she says. So would she rather not use the pouch? “I’d rather have my phone, I don’t feel as safe without it.”
Within three or four weeks, “we saw real changes”, McBeath says. Teachers had to change teaching style, to pick up the pace of increased focus. In just one term, detentions have decreased by 40 per cent. The number of students truanting from lessons fell by 25 per cent. “We asked one of our regular truants, ‘What changed?’ and he says, ‘Well, you know, if I don’t want to go to geography, I can’t go and watch Netflix in the toilets.’”
Another surprise: the safeguarding reports of social media issues, which were already low, but have “dropped off a cliff”. They are at the lowest level in the four years McBeath has been at the school. “We still haven’t understood that, since you would imagine that takes place largely outside school.”
And then came the “softer” changes, which teachers talk about with the wonder of watching a meadow re-wild. “It sounds ridiculous, but we saw students flirting for the first time,” McBeath says. “We obviously didn’t do it for that reason, but you suddenly realise the only way they were communicating was online.”
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I point to the games of cards I saw in the canteen, was that there before? “Never seen it, in my four years,” McBeath says. Standing in the sunlight at break, I watch kids whirling around me like puppies with the zoomies.
Were they playing tag before? “Never seen tag here before,” McBeath says. Students used to use their phones to keep time, now they must relearn analog clocks. One teacher told me: “I have started saying, ‘When the big hand is on the six, the test will end.’ They once learnt how to do it but never got the practice.”
Finally, I sit down with a group of children, including Zac and Janyia, both aged 16, with their pouches, both scribbled in Biro with their names. Before, the group agreed their phones recorded about 8 to 14 hours of screen time a day, including a hefty chunk of school time. Their school was strict about the phone rule previously, but still, “if you’re careful you could always sneak at your phone, especially towards the back of the class”.
“I checked it probably once a lesson,” Zac said. “Mainly for the time and if I needed to send a text, you’d see kids listening to music as well if they could cover up the earbud.”
If Zac got a notification, “I’m desperate to look at it.” Breaktime would be spent with kids mostly on the phone, using a whole bag of concealment tricks, including body-blocking and using bags and books as covers. Adults, they say, underestimate how much of school time is spent hiding away to disguise phone use.
As soon as the pouch system began, students looked for ways to hack it. There are dozens of TikTok videos on how to break into a Yondr pouch. Yet when I tried to use their methods, such as a strong magnet or banging the lock, I failed. (Yondr told me it has increased pouch security.)
“The first few days, you could just hear people banging it on the wall in the toilets,” one boy says. “It got it open, but it’s really loud so the teachers could hear.” Also, the banging would often break the pouch, causing their parents to have to pay £25 for a new one. The school show me a pouch that was opened with scissors, looking like a frenzied attack. He had to buy a replacement.
What were the first days like, without a phone? “Abnormal,” Janyia says. “A lot of people just sat there, not doing much. They didn’t know what to do without their phones.”
Now she says, she has become much closer to her friends, “we talk more deeply than online”. They don’t have to hide away any more. Are the students happier? Yes, Janyia says. Do they work better? Yes, she says. Would they vote to have their phones back like before? “Fifty-fifty,” Janyia says. “Because we all want our phones so much. Too much.”
