To stop screen addiction, this school will give out phones. But there’s a catch

Jessica Spence is wise due to bitter experience. At the ripe age of 15, she has already felt the grip of addiction and wrestled herself free from it. Her poison? Her phone. Through sheer will, she has wound back her use from nine hours a day to less than one.

Her friends talk about their phones in terms of addiction, too. They were given smartphones in year 7, and found themselves in the thrall of TikTok’s algorithm. They now think they were too young. “It’s so much easier to stop the addiction before it starts,” said Audrey Lin, 15.

As families globally struggle to manage their children’s screen obsessions, Pymble Ladies’ College has devised a ground-breaking way to help. From next year, the school will give its students semi-smartphones and control what they can access.

Students in year 9 at Pymble Ladies’ College say they regret the time they’ve wasted on their phones. Credit: Janie Barrett

Year 4 to 5 students will only be able to make calls and send texts. In years 5 to 7, they can add a camera, as well as payment and learning apps. In years 8 and 9, they can access chat groups, Spotify and Bluetooth. The restrictions end in year 10.

PLC parents, who are balancing their reluctance to put access to the depths of the internet in a student’s pocket from age 12 with the reality that everyone else does, have embraced the Wise Phone proposal.

The entire incoming year 6 and 7 cohorts have accepted the offer. Two-thirds of year 4 parents have too (the rest don’t want their children to have phones). Even among year 8 parents, most of whom have already given their girls a smartphone, 40 per cent have said yes.

PLC principal Kate Hadwen, a PhD who has worked in child health, was inspired to act when she listened to the year 9 students reflect on the harm caused by their phones. She hopes the Wise Phone initiative will improve relationships and results, and reduce cyberbullying.

She compares it to teaching children to swim – we don’t hurl them in the ocean at 12 without teaching them the skills they’ll need first, so why would we hurl them into the quagmire of social media or the depths of the internet?

One boarder’s dad “gave his daughter a phone six months ago to try to get her used to the phone before she came in,” she said. “He felt he lost his daughter [to it]. He’s so happy we made this decision. I feel like it’s a wonderful step in the right direction.”

The struggle to help teens with screens is consuming parents, educators and politicians.

The federal government says it will ban social media use for under 16s, citing a digital duty of care. From next year, British boarding school Eton will allow its year 9 students to use only a so-called dumb phone, which is limited to calls and texts.

As part of its proposal, PLC gathered research showing many children spend four to seven hours a day on their smartphones, and almost 50 per cent of parents say a smartphone had changed their child’s personality.

The college has chosen a hybrid phone. It will buy the phone (it costs $100), identify and manage the apps and provide tech support. Parents pay for the SIM card, for privacy reasons. Parents have asked Hadwen if their sons can get a PLC phone, too. She hopes other schools will adopt the plan.

“We’d love this to be a broader community initiative, which is really what sparked this conversation,” she said. “How do we encourage others to get involved in this movement, the more people who are in this the stronger it will be.”

PLC parent Luisa Hanna was quick to get on board. She held off buying her daughter a smartphone, but felt having one would be inevitable when she began year 7 next year and took public transport to school. “Her phone would have become her world and we’d find it impossible to take it off her,” she said.

Lin would have liked a Wise Phone. “It’s going to help a lot of upcoming year 7, and all of the years before them, to keep their time rather than letting it dissolve into their phone, and not feel guilty when you look back and see all the time you’ve wasted,” she said.

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