View from the Top: Jonathon Anderson on phone-free schools

The headmaster of Aysgarth reflects on what is lost when young people spend more time looking at screens than at one another. In a thoughtful case for phone-free schools, he argues that some of education’s most important lessons - confidence, conversation and the ability to build meaningful relationships - are learned face to face, not through a device.

'Look at one of your university photos and you will spot the elephant not in the room. If you are as old as me, you won’t see any mobile phones. Over the years that have passed since my late-90s experiences in Exeter, mobiles have become ubiquitous. We have embraced the connectivity, marvelled at their capability and struggled with their dark side. Years ago, a teacher told me that not allowing phones would be to disadvantage children in their understanding of technology. Now, families, schools, and entire countries seek to make some sense of what is really appropriate.  

Our schools have the chance to make a difference. The parents I see are delighted that we take a phone-free stance. For them, I suspect, it makes the private conversations at home about ‘screen time’ more manageable. As ever, we are, as schools and parents, in this together.  

The more I do this job, the more I think about the value of personality - to coin the Rugby School mantra, ‘The Whole Person, The Whole Point’. Of course, skills and knowledge need to be acquired, but quantify for me, if you will, the value of a smile on the face of the teenager you have just been introduced to. Imagine them making confident eye contact with you and, before you have the chance to ask them something ‘teachery’, they hit you with a few questions of their own. Impressed? You know you would be.  

As the highly impressive Paul Gurney of Becoming X said to an audience recently, the most undervalued aspect of education is relationships. He spoke of ‘tribe builders’: kind, funny, trustworthy, and respectful. We develop these traits face-to-face, learning from the ups and downs of community life and nowhere is that more obvious than in our boarding houses. As educators, we must do everything in our power to let free time make bridge builders, not islands, of our charges. Wafer-thin COVID masks made conversations feel strangely impersonal because we could not see each other’s mouths - why would we willingly endorse anything that replicates that disconnection?'

May 2026