Banning phones in schools is just another ploy to distract us | Eva Wiseman

We need nuance and empathy in addressing this complex issue

Whenever the government talks about the dangers to children of the mobile phone we must picture this phone as a large rock under which a hundred shameful decisions live in darkness.

I have concerns about mobile phones, of course I do. I've followed Esther Ghey's campaign to ban smartphones for kids, and how education secretary Gillian Keegan has leapt upon this, with cautious interest. My eldest child will soon be approaching secondary school, and while I'd vaguely assumed that her generation would find phones desperately unchic by the time they came of carrying age, associating them with dull and red-eyed parents, this does not appear to be the case. And the stories I hear from teachers or parents of teenagers sometimes chill me - the ways that bullying mutates online, or how phones exacerbate poor mental health, or teens' sinister, quotidian acts of surveillance.