Key points:

By now, it’s no secret that phones are a problem in classrooms. A growing body of research and an even louder chorus of educators point to the same conclusion: students are distracted, they’re disengaged, and their learning is suffering. What’s less clear is how to solve this issue. 

Of late, school districts across the country are drawing firmer lines. From Portland, Maine to Conroe, Texas and Springdale, Arkansas, administrators are implementing “bell-to-bell” phone bans, prohibiting access from the first bell to the last. Many are turning to physical tools like pouches and smart lockers, which lock away devices for the duration of the day, to enforce these rules. The logic is straightforward: take the phones away, and you eliminate the distraction.

In many ways, it works. Schools report fewer behavioral issues, more focused classrooms, and an overall sense of calm returning to hallways once buzzing with digital noise. But as these policies scale, the limitations are becoming more apparent.

But students, as always, find ways around the rules. They’ll bring second phones to school or slip their device in undetected–and more. Teachers, already stretched thin, are now tasked with enforcement, turning minor infractions into disciplinary incidents. 

Some parents and students are also pushing back, arguing that all-day bans are too rigid, especially when phones serve as lifelines for communication, medical needs, or even digital learning. In Middletown, Connecticut, students reportedly became emotional just days after a new ban took effect, citing the abrupt change in routine and lack of trust.

The bigger question is this: Are we trying to eliminate phones, or are we trying to teach responsible use?

That distinction matters. While it’s clear that phone misuse is widespread and the intent behind bans is to restore focus and reduce anxiety, blanket prohibitions risk sending the wrong message. Instead of fostering digital maturity, they can suggest that young people are incapable of self-regulation. And in doing so, they may sidestep an important opportunity: using school as a place to practice responsible tech habits, not just prohibit them.

This is especially critical given the scope of the problem. A recent study by Fluid Focus found that students spend five to six hours a day on their phones during school hours. Two-thirds said it had a negative impact on their academic performance. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 77 percent of school leaders believe phones hurt learning. The data is hard to ignore.

But managing distraction isn’t just about removal. It’s also about design. Schools that treat device policy as an infrastructure issue, rather than a disciplinary one, are beginning to implement more structured approaches. 

Some are turning to smart locker systems that provide centralized, secure phone storage while offering greater flexibility: configurable access windows, charging capabilities, and even low admin options to help keep teachers teaching. These systems don’t “solve” the phone problem, but they do help schools move beyond the extremes of all-or-nothing.

And let’s not forget equity. Not all students come to school with the same tech, support systems, or charging access. A punitive model that assumes all students have smartphones (or can afford to lose access to them) risks deepening existing divides. Structured storage systems can help level the playing field, offering secure and consistent access to tech tools without relying on personal privilege or penalizing students for systemic gaps.

That said, infrastructure alone isn’t the answer. Any solution needs to be accompanied by clear communication, transparent expectations, and intentional alignment with school culture. Schools must engage students, parents, and teachers in conversations about what responsible phone use actually looks like and must be willing to revise policies based on feedback. Too often, well-meaning bans are rolled out with minimal explanation, creating confusion and resistance that undermine their effectiveness.

Nor should we idealize “focus” as the only metric of success. Mental health, autonomy, connection, and trust all play a role in creating school environments where students thrive. If students feel overly surveilled or infantilized, they’re unlikely to engage meaningfully with the values behind the policy. The goal should not be control for its own sake, it should be cultivating habits that carry into life beyond the classroom.

The ubiquity of smartphones is undeniable. While phones are here to stay, the classroom represents one of the few environments where young people can learn how to use them wisely, or not at all. That makes schools not just sites of instruction, but laboratories for digital maturity.

The danger isn’t that we’ll do too little. It’s that we’ll settle for solutions that are too simplistic or too focused on optics, instead of focusing  not on outcomes.

We need more than bans. We need balance. That means moving past reactionary policies and toward systems that respect both the realities of modern life and the capacity of young people to grow. It means crafting strategies that support teachers without overburdening them, that protect focus without sacrificing fairness, and that reflect not just what we’re trying to prevent, but what we hope to build.

The real goal shouldn’t be to simply get phones out of kids’ hands. It should be to help them learn when to put them down on their own.

Tens of thousands of foreign students are to be contacted directly by the government and warned that they will be removed from the UK if they overstay their visas.

The Home Office has launched the new campaign in response to what it has called an “alarming” spike in the number of international students arriving legally on student visas then claiming asylum when they expire.

As part of the campaign, the Home Office will for the first time proactively contact about 130,000 students and their families, warning them they will be forced to leave the UK if they have no legal right to remain.

The full message will read: “If you submit an asylum claim that lacks merit, it will be swiftly and robustly refused. Any request for asylum support will be assessed against destitution criteria. If you do not meet the criteria, you will not receive support. If you have no legal right to remain in the UK, you must leave. If you don’t, we will remove you.”

Although the political and media focus this summer has been on people arriving on small boats, a similar number arrive legally with visas, then apply for asylum often when those visas run out.

Many claims are legitimate, but ministers fear that too many international students are seeking asylum to stay in the country because their leave to remain has run out. Earlier this year, the Home Office cut the amount of time overseas graduates can stay in the UK after their studies from two years to 18 months.

In the year to June 2025, 43,600 people seeking asylum arrived on a small boat – 39% of all asylum claims, according to Home Office data. Another 41,100 asylum claims came from people who entered legally with a visa, with the largest group among visa holders being students – 16,000 last year, nearly six times as many as in 2020.

Since then, Home Office data shows there has been a drop of 10%, but ministers in the department want the figures to fall further.

This week, the government has been under pressure from opposition parties including the Conservatives and Reform to declare “a national emergency” on migration and illegal immigration.

On Tuesday morning, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, declined to guarantee that migrants would definitely be sent back across the Channel this month as part of a returns agreement with France, after telling the Commons on Monday that the first returns under the deal were expected in late September.

When pressed, she replied: “We expect the first returns to take place this month. But I’ve always said from the very beginning on this, it’s a pilot scheme and it needs to build up over time.”

She contrasted her “practical and sensible” approach with that of the previous Conservative government on Rwanda, which “spent £700m and sent four volunteers after running it for two years”.

She also told Times Radio that ministers believe asylum hotels can be emptied earlier than the end of the current parliament, after Keir Starmer said on Monday that he wanted to move all asylum seekers out of hotel accommodation before his government’s deadline of the end of the parliament, which could last until 2029.

Good morning. It’s back-to-school week, and the daily ritual (or, perhaps, panic) begins as uniforms are being donned and lunchboxes packed across the UK to start a new year. My sympathies to you teachers setting early morning alarms, and parents dragging children out of bed after six weeks of lie-ins.

Last year, Keir Starmer promised to leave “no stone unturned to give every child the very best start at life”, but how is that going? More than half a million GCSE students in England will start the year with no physics teacher, while many kids from poorer families feel they cannot afford to have their children study geography or languages, new Guardian reporting shows.

These are just a few things that reveal bigger issues about the lack of opportunities for millions of bleary-eyed children getting up for school this week. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Guardian education correspondent Sally Weale about how inequality is embedded into the system, and whether Labour is doing enough to tackle it. First, the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Afghanistan | The Taliban has called for international aid as Afghanistan reels from an earthquake that killed more than 800 people and left thousands injured.

2. Israel-Gaza war | A plan circulating in the White House to develop the “Gaza Riviera” as a string of high-tech megacities has been dismissed as an “insane” attempt to provide cover for the large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory’s population.

3. Politics | Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has been moved to a new senior role in Downing Street as Keir Starmer attempts to get a grip on delivery before what is likely to be a tumultuous autumn for the government.

4. Health | A three-minute brainwave test can detect memory problems linked to Alzheimer’s disease long before people are typically diagnosed, raising hopes that the approach could help identify those most likely to benefit from new drugs for the condition.

5. UK news | Prominent women including cultural figures, politicians and campaigners have signed a letter criticising rightwing attempts to link sexual violence in Britain to asylum seekers. Signatories include the musicians Paloma Faith, Charlotte Church and Anoushka Shankar.

A significant challenge for some schools starts not in the classroom but with recruitment. One-quarter of English state schools have no specialist physics teachers, with maths, biology or chemistry teachers typically being roped in to do the job, according to research by the Institute of Physics. Many of these teachers have not studied physics beyond the age of 18, and may themselves have only studied the subject to GCSE level.

“Recruitment of new teachers, and then retention of teachers you’ve already got, has been very difficult for quite a long time,” said Sally Weale. Take physics: people with science degrees are likely to have a lot of better-paid employment opportunities in the private sector. “Certain school subjects have been particularly badly affected, and physics is a big one. Most head teachers I talked to said the physics teacher is a big issue for them. Very often they haven’t got one.”

Pay for teachers is typically poor, and it’s a tough job with long hours, and generally no opportunities for working from home. “You are in front of 30 students, you have to be at the top of your game all the time,” said Sally.

Students in schools without specialist physics teachers are half as likely to go on to study A-level physics. More than 300 schools in England have none taking it, the report found. Unsurprisingly it is typically kids in the poorer areas who are worst affected.

Not only does this negatively impact opportunities for individual students, it also make it difficult to recruit scientists and innovators in key sectors such as quantum, photonics, nuclear and semiconductors, the report found.

‘Baked-in inequality’

Secondary school pupils from low-income families are “bounced out” of studying subjects like geography and languages because of concerns about the cost of field trips and excursions abroad, according to a survey of children in England. Fears about extra costs prevent almost a quarter of children on free school meals from choosing certain GCSE subjects.

“The reality is that some subjects just are no-go areas for lower-income families,” said Sally. “I remember when there would be school trips and parents would just say, ‘Sorry, we can’t afford it.’ I think it’s always been part of what’s going on in schools, but these differences have become much more acute.”

Other subjects with additional costs are music, which can require lessons and instruments; food and nutrition, due to the cost of ingredients; and PE, because of extra kit and equipment. Nine per cent of pupils who did not receive free-school meals said the cost – or concerns about the cost – prevented them from studying these subjects, according to Survation for the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG).

“Kids from the poorest backgrounds are always at such a huge disadvantage. It’s not just what subjects they can study and it’s not just physics teachers,” said Sally. “They could be living in areas where it’s hard to attract good teachers, or they don’t have access to the same enrichment, or their families have less capacity to support them. This is something that I’m writing about all the time, and have been ever since I started this job over 10 years ago. It’s a kind of baked-in inequality that is very hard to deal with, and it’s basically about poverty.”

What is the attainment gap?

This year, A-level results in England reached a record high outside the pandemic era, However, the stark regional divide between London and the rest of the UK, particularly the north-east and East Midlands, has widened. This is down to a range of factors, including investment in London schools during the Blair government, the higher pay and attractiveness of working in London for teachers, and gentrification of the city.

The attainment gap between poorer students and their wealthier peers had been closing from about 2010 onwards, but that progress began to stall in 2018, probably because of funding pressures on schools, said Sally. Since Covid, the gap has grown and though there have been small signs of improvement recently, the gap remains far bigger than before the pandemic.

“Covid blew it all out of the water. The government would say there’s some evidence the attainment gap is closing slightly, but it’s still absolutely huge,” Sally said. “Disadvantaged four-year-olds are already on the back foot by the time they start school.”

What is Labour doing?

Since Labour has come in it has expanded free school meals, including introducing free breakfast clubs into all primary schools in England. From this week, working parents who earn up to £100,000 a year will be entitled to 30 hours’ free childcare a week during term time for children from the age of nine months until they start school. “Critics would say it barely scratches the surface,” said Sally.

Labour’s flagship child poverty strategy will not be published until autumn. The decision to push back the strategy comes amid concerns about the cost implications of ending the two-child limit on universal credit. Experts say scrapping the benefit limit would be the single most effective way of reducing child poverty – an estimated 100 children are pulled into poverty every day by the limit, meaning up to 20,000 could be affected by a six-month delay.

“Everybody is waiting to see the sort of child poverty strategy. I think that will be key to how their success is regarded,” said Sally. “At the heart of that is the two child benefit cap. The general feeling is that it needs to go, and it’s responsible for keeping too many families in poverty. Poverty is an enemy of opportunity.”

What else we’ve been reading

• Is Donald Trump a dictator? Adam Gabbatt surveys the US president’s inflammatory actions – from deploying the national guard to his compulsive use of executive orders. He speaks with political scientists about where Trump currently sits on the spectrum of between democracy, authoritarianism and outright dictatorship. (From more by Adam, sign up to his Week in Trumpland newsletter here.) Craille Maguire Gillies, newsletters team

• More and more people are blocking out the news because it fills them with dread. This piece examines the emotional toll of “doomscrolling”, and gives tips on how to stay engaged and not fall into a pit of negativity – if you can face reading it. Phoebe

• Dr Velislava Hillman is persuasive about how AI in education is a lot less revolutionary than big tech companies might make it seem. “What is sold as the ‘democratisation’ of education may be entrenching further inequality,” she writes, as the elite opt for human tutoring and the less-privileged are offered mass, app-based instruction. Craille

• Some great news from conservationists who have found Mexico’s jaguar population has increased 30%. The main thing they’ve done is protect natural areas to keep these beautiful cats away from cattle ranchers. “Mexico and the world need good news,” said one of the conservationists. Here’s to that. Phoebe

• Perhaps I am not a better cook after listening to episode 20 of the four-part podcast Home Cooking, but I am certainly charmed by the sibling-like camaraderie of its hosts, Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway. Craille

Sport

Football | Liverpool broke the British transfer record to sign Alexander Isak for £125m from Newcastle on deadline day but were foiled in an attempt to end a stunning window with a deal for Marc Guéhi. Transfer roundup

Golf | Europe will defend the Ryder Cup later this month with 11 of the 12 players who saw off the United States in Rome two years ago after captain Luke Donald unsurprisingly opted for experience with his wildcard picks.

Tennis | The All England Club is not looking to change the format of the Wimbledon mixed doubles competition for future editions of the Championships despite the success of the “reimagined” tournament at the US Open.

The front pages