The government is moving to make phone bans in England’s schools a legal requirement. Sky News is reporting that an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will turn what was previously DfE guidance into statute, with the Lords voting 107 in favour today and the Commons expected to vote on Wednesday.

The Department for Education’s line on this is worth quoting in full, because it tells you most of what you need to know about the policy:

“We have been consistently clear that mobile phones have no place in schools, and the majority already prohibit them. This amendment makes existing guidance statutory, giving legal force to what schools are already doing in practice.”

So: the ban isn’t new. What’s new is the legal backstop behind it.

What this actually changes

The DfE’s mobile phones in schools guidance has been non-statutory since it was issued. Headteachers could follow it or ignore it. Ofsted has been looking at phone policies as part of inspection from this spring, which already put pressure on schools to have something written down. Moving to statute makes it harder to argue with a parent who doesn’t think their child’s phone is the school’s business.

For most schools, that’s the entire delta. If you already have a policy that says phones go in a pouch, a locker, or the bottom of a bag at 8:30 and don’t come out until 3:30, this law backs you up. If you’re a sixth form with a more relaxed approach, the reported exemptions for sixth-formers, medical devices and some boarding settings look like they’ll give you room to keep that.

The hard part was never deciding to ban

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT, put it plainly:

“Schools will only then need to decide how to implement and enforce a ban across their school community and the government must provide any support they require to do so effectively.”

That word “only” is doing a lot of work. Enforcement is where school phone policies actually live or die, and it’s almost entirely a school-level problem that a piece of legislation doesn’t solve.

The practical questions you’re left with don’t change when the guidance becomes law:

Where does the phone go? Yondr-style pouches work but cost money. Lockers need infrastructure and trust. “Off and in your bag” relies on pupils not being pupils. Each option has a different failure mode.

Who confiscates, and what happens next? A year 10 refuses to hand over a phone during form time. Is that a form tutor problem, a head of year problem, or a safeguarding problem? Where does the device live until it’s returned, and who’s liable if it’s damaged or stolen in that window?

How do parents contact their child in an emergency? This is the single biggest parental objection to a blanket ban, and the answer (“through the school office”) only works if the school office actually works. It’s a resourcing question as much as a policy one.

What about 4G and 5G? Your network-level web filter catches very little of this. Pupils with a data plan can route around any content filtering the moment the device is in their hand. The only real control is whether the phone comes out of the bag at all, which brings you back to enforcement.

The wider frame

Phones in schools is the narrow end of a much bigger policy wedge. The same Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill gives ministers flexible powers to restrict children’s social media use more broadly, including potential curfews, scrolling limits and location-sharing restrictions. The Lords have twice tried to add outright social media age limits; MPs voted both attempts down. The phone-in-schools amendment is the first piece of this agenda to make it through, probably because it has the least political friction — Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott called it “fantastic news for headteachers, parents and pupils across the country,” which is not a sentence opposition front benches usually hand the government.

What schools should actually do now

Assuming the Commons passes the amendment on Wednesday, I wouldn’t rush to rewrite anything. If you have a policy, read it and ask whether the enforcement mechanism described in it is actually what happens day-to-day. If it isn’t, that’s the gap to close, not the policy document.

If you don’t have a policy, you now have a legal obligation to get one, and Ofsted is already looking for it. Start with the simple version — phones off, out of sight, during the school day — and work through the edge cases (sixth form, SEND, medical, off-site trips) as a second pass. Don’t write a twenty-page document; write one you can actually enforce.

And don’t mistake the new law for the work being done. Parliament has decided the outcome. Schools still have to decide how to get there.