PUPILS at Cowes Enterprise College are set to be banned from using smartphones during the school day, as part of a move by one of the largest school academy trusts, across all its schools in England.

Ormiston Academies Trust is phasing out access to smartphones for around 35,000 pupils at its 42 state schools across the country, of which Cowes Enterprise College is one.

The trust is bringing in the rules during the school day, due to the “overwhelming” relationship between their use and mental health, according to Ormiston's chief executive, Tom Rees.

He told The Guardian newspaper the trust was “seeing huge and real concerns” about pupils’ mental health, with a “clear correlation” between it and the use of phones and social media.

“Not all mobile phone use is equal and the relationship between that and adolescent mental health, we think, is overwhelming,” he said.

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“There is a responsibility for society to respond, and a responsibility for schools to make it harder for children to access inappropriate content through the school day, and restrict the draw of social media.”

New policies on phones will be introduced at eight of the trust’s 32 secondary schools this term, with the remaining academies following, after liaising with parents.

Access to phones is already ruled out at the trust’s primary, special needs and alternative provision schools.

Mr Rees said “a battle for focus and concentration”, to help learning, was one of the reasons behind the move, with pupils thinking about any notifications on their phones.

“That is impacting young people’s ability to learn, to retain information, to concentrate and to focus,” he said.

“An increasing distraction is catastrophic for the process of learning — true both at school and at home.”

In February, the Department for Education issued guidance which said: “We owe it to our children to do what we can to remove distractions and enable them to be fully present and engaged in the classroom."

Former education secretary, Gillian Keegan, said: “We owe it to our pupils to keep them safe at school," adding one in five pupils had experienced bullying online, while one in three used phones in most lessons without permission.

Ormiston added: “Moving forward and over time, we believe it is desirable for our academies to move to a position where children do not access their phones at all throughout the school day.

"Teaching and learning, behaviour and children’s mental health are all impacted negatively by mobile phones.

“Our schools are at different stages of the journey. A quarter of our secondary schools are piloting different approaches to this over the autumn term, and one is phone-free, where it’s been really successful and is popular with parents and students.

“We want schools to do this at their pace — they are best placed to make the decisions because they know their schools best, and because we want them to consult with their parent and pupil communities, as is happening at Cowes Enterprise College.”