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Give it Three Years

  • Jul 7
  • 4 min read

Picture the headteacher who spent August locking nine hundred phones into pouches. Big announcement. Assembly with a countdown. A staff briefing about a “new era” of focused, present, phone-free learning. By October she’s not looking at calmer corridors. She’s looking at a spike in isolation referrals and a duty rota that’s suddenly a lot busier than last year.


If that sounds like a very specific failure, it isn’t. It’s the national average.


In May, a team of researchers from Stanford, Duke, Michigan and Pennsylvania published the largest study of school phone bans ever attempted, an NBER working paper drawing on data from around 4,600 schools that had adopted lockable Yondr pouches, the first genuinely nationally representative look at these bans. The headline finding travelled fast. Phone use during the day dropped hard (teacher surveys found the share of students using phones for personal reasons in class fell from 61 percent to 13 percent), but there was little sign of the quick fix everyone was hoping for. Test scores barely moved. Reported online bullying didn’t budge. And in the first year, suspension rates actually rose by around 16 percent, while measures of student well-being dipped rather than lifted. It wasn’t until the third year that suspensions fell back to their starting point and, in the words of lead researcher Thomas Dee, well-being was “actually above what it was at baseline.”


That’s an uncomfortable shape for a graph. Everyone wants the line that goes straight up after the policy launches. What we actually got was a dip, then a slow climb, spread across three school years.


I think that’s the most useful part of the whole study, and it’s the part getting the least attention in the coverage. Most of the commentary has focused on whether phone bans “work,” as though that’s a yes or no question you can answer in a single Ofsted cycle. Locking a phone in a pouch removes a stimulus. It doesn’t automatically instill the skill that stimulus was standing in for. Take away the thing that a child has been using to regulate, distract, numb or escape, and for a while, you don’t get calm. You get the raw version of whatever the phone was covering up. Only over time, as new habits, relationships and routines fill that space, does the system settle into something better than where it started.


This lands at an awkward moment for English schools, because the same debate is playing out here, with an inspector standing over it. The Department for Education’s updated guidance now says that “all schools should be mobile phone-free environments by default,” and Ofsted has folded that straight into inspection. Since April, if phones are contributing to disruption or harming pupils’ wellbeing, a school can miss the “expected standard” for attendance and behaviour altogether, one of six areas graded on Ofsted’s five-point scale under the framework that’s been running since November 2025. So picture the headteacher from paragraph one again. She brings in a full ban this term, lives through exactly the messy first year dip that the American data describes, and gets inspected right in the middle of it. That’s not a reason to duck the policy. It’s a reason to be honest, with governors and with your own staff, about the shape of the curve you’re actually on before an inspector asks you to explain it.


This is the piece we talk about constantly at Navigate: structural change and cultural change are not the same thing, and you can’t skip from one to the other. A pouch, a redrawn timetable, a fresh behaviour policy, a shinier attendance dashboard, these all fall into the same category. They attempt to change the environment. They make it more predictable, and predictability is something that we’re fully behind. It’s one of the conditions that children need in order to feel safe enough to learn. But predictability on its own doesn’t teach a nervous system how to cope without its usual crutch. That takes safe relationships to lean on while the old habit is being unlearned, and accessible routes back to calm and connection when the inevitable wobble happens. Skip those two, and the predictable environment on its own just produces a longer, angrier adjustment period. Which, if the American data is anything to go by, is exactly what a lot of schools are living through right now.


So if you’re the headteacher three weeks into a new policy, watching the numbers move the wrong way, this is worth holding onto. The dip might not be evidence that it’s failing. It might be evidence that it’s working exactly and as slowly as it’s supposed to. The question isn’t whether behaviour improved by half term. It’s whether you built enough safety and enough recovery around the change to survive long enough to find out.


Sources


The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches, NBER Working Paper 35132, Allcott, Baron, Dee, Duckworth, Gentzkow and Jacob: https://www.nber.org/papers/w35132


National study of school cell phone bans shows benefits are not immediate, Stanford Graduate School of Education: https://ed.stanford.edu/news/national-study-school-cell-phone-bans-shows-benefits-are-not-immediate



What the government's updated guidance on mobile phones means for school inspections, Ofsted (GOV.UK blog): https://educationinspection.blog.gov.uk/2026/01/23/what-the-governments-updated-guidance-on-mobile-phones-means-for-school-inspections/


 
 
 

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