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Two fathers are looking to legally challenge government guidance phones Schools have received significant new support, with a teenager and mother of three joining the planned action.
Flossie McShea, 17, and Katie Moore, 43, have lent their support to Will Orr-Ewing and Pete Montgomery’s claim for a judicial review, which seeks smart fone Complete ban in schools.
Miss McShea, who has joined as a contender, says she feels so education department ,DfE) has failed to protect him and other children from harm caused by phones during school hours.
He said that smartphone use “completely changed my life from year seven onwards”.
“I was exposed to pornography and violent videos such as beheading videos. I was sent a video of two young children who had found a gun and one of them accidentally shot the other,” Ms McShea said.
“I had to go home. A lot of incidents like this happened and many of my friends had similar experiences.
“All of this actually happens in school because you can see live reactions. We’re all gathered in this place, so people find it’s more engaging to share this content online when you can get reactions from 30 kids in the classroom.
“I think if I didn’t have a phone, and if we didn’t have phones at school, I wouldn’t be exposed to things I don’t want to be exposed to.”
Miss McShea School has imposed a complete ban on smartphones in the school premises.
“The other day, I got on the school bus and there was a group of 7-year-olds laughing and talking. I felt so happy for them,” she said.
“We never had that because we were always looking down and scrolling.”
Mother Mrs Moore, from Northampton, is also joining the claim after her daughter, now 18, told her she had been shown sexually explicit images in a school changing room on the phone, and once another pupil had entered a video chat room at the school, she was confronted with videos of men masturbating.
She said it was “devastating” to hear what her daughter discovered online.
“As a parent bringing a teenager into a world that pushes us towards technology and is dependent on these technologies, it has been very exhausting,” Mrs Moore said.
She said she tried to delay giving her daughter a smartphone as long as possible, but she felt pressured to give one when all her peers had smartphones.
Mrs Moore believes a complete statutory ban on phones in school is the only solution and said ‘out of sight’ policies for phone use in schools do not go far enough.
Mr Orr-Ewing and Mr Montgomery, both parents of school-age children, wrote to the Education Secretary bridget philipson in July to say he intended to challenge mandatory school phone bans that were not included in safety guidance for schools.
They are conducting judicial review under an organization called Generation Alpha CIC.
The lawyers will file papers in the High Court on Monday.
Under the former Conservative government, schools were issued non-statutory guidance aimed at preventing phone use during the school day.
A survey by the Children’s Commissioner earlier this year found that 90 per cent of secondary schools and 99.8 per cent of primary schools already had policies in place to prevent phone use during the school day.
The majority of secondary schools surveyed (79 percent) allowed students to bring a phone, but said it should remain out of sight and not be used. Only 3.5 percent said students are not allowed to bring phones to school.
In July, Mr Montgomery and Mr Orr-Ewing said they had given schools freedom to make information requests about security incidents related to phones and social media. They found that in the case of one school, it had referred 55 incidents to social services, of which 17 were referred to the police.
Mr Montgomery said removing smartphones from schools was “no easy task”.
“This should be the easiest decision in the world for the government to take,” he said. “But they have not taken it, so we have no other option but to go to court.”
A government spokesperson said: “Phones have no place in our schools, and leaders already have the power to ban phones.
“We support headteachers to take the necessary steps to prevent disruption with clear guidance, and have also brought in better protection for children from harmful content through the Online Safety Act.”