Mobile phones to be banned in Catalan primary schools next year

The Catalan Minister of Education, Anna Simó, announced on Saturday in an interview with Rac1 radio that primary education in Catalonia will be "free of smartphones" from the next school year.

The ban on mobile phones in primary education, which covers students between the ages of six and 12, is expected to take effect at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year to give schools time to adapt. 

Meanwhile, Simó announced that mobile phones will not be banned in high schools, which include students between the ages of 12 and 16. The minister said that each school will decide on its own policy. 

The secretary of the Secondary School Teachers' Union, Xavier Massó, criticized the decision not to ban mobile phones in high schools and demanded that they be prohibited at least in classrooms. 

"What is this? This is a mess. The department cannot stay away from this; what they should do is ban it once and for all," he said in Rac1. 

He argues that leaving the decision up to the schools "will create more problems than there already are," since one school might ban it while the one next door might not. 

The regulation of the use of mobile phones in classrooms has been a long-running debate in recent months, but it has been heightened by the recent revelation of Catalan students' poor results in the PISA tests.

Parents unite against early cell phone use

In November, a group of families from Barcelona's Poblenou neighborhood banded together to ensure that their children would not have smartphones until the age of 16.    

Soon, the organization spread to other neighborhoods in Barcelona and different cities in Catalonia through WhatsApp and Telegram groups, under the initiative 'Adolescència lliure de mòbil' (Youth without a phone).   

In a few days, thousands of other families joined the groups, and the main Telegram group now has more than 10,000 members.  

Parents say they are not against the use of new technologies, but they are concerned about its use at an early age.    

They point out that there is a lot of peer pressure to buy a phone for their children, because if they don't, their children will be the only ones in the class without one, which in turn complicates the parent-child relationship.   

Following the uproar caused by the initiative, the Catalan government launched a participatory process to gather the opinions of teachers, families and students from all over the territory regarding the presence of mobile phones in schools and high schools.  

At the end of the process, expected in early 2024, the Department of Education will provide schools with a specific framework for regulating the use of cell phones in schools.