P.E.I. school smartphone restrictions don’t go far enough

Thanks to the King government’s new smartphone restrictions, when students return to school next week they’ll have less time with their phones. But while the restrictions are a step in the right direction, they don’t go nearly far enough.

According to the government, which is following a similar tact as other provincial governments across Canada, students in kindergarten to Grade 6 must put away their phones for the school day, while kids from grades 7 to 12 will only have access to their phones during breaks. And crucially, all students can use their phones in class if teachers permit it.

In other words, smartphones will likely remain a problem in Prince Edward Island classrooms. And the evidence of the negative effects is mounting. Unlike adults, kids and teenagers do not have fully formed prefrontal cortexes, which predisposes them to increased anxiety and lack of focus.

According to one study, the typical teenager receives 237 smartphone notifications per day—about 15 per hour. Another study found it takes kids 20 minutes to regain focus after just one distraction. And further research found that even having a phone nearby, with notifications buzzing, is enough to cause students to lose focus on classroom tasks.

So if Jack has his phone nearby, he’ll be distracted—and so will Jill sitting two desks away, especially in math class. According to the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, six in 10 students in OECD countries said they were distracted by other kids’ digital devices in math class. And kids who were distracted by phones—either their own, or the phones of other kids—performed markedly worse on math tests than students who weren’t distracted.

That’s bad news, particularly in P.E.I. where, according to PISA, math scores dropped 22 points from 2003 to 2022, the latest year of student test data. For context, PISA equates a 20-point drop in student test scores as one year of lost learning.

Consequently, P.E.I. students are now 19 points—about one year of learning—behind the Canadian average in math. Quebec is only about a seven-hour drive away, yet P.E.I. students are 36 points (or almost two years) behind Quebec students.

So what’s the solution?

Based on the evidence, the government should ban all smartphones in public schools for all grades for the entire school day, emulating successful policies in private schools in other jurisdictions. Removing this toxic distraction from classrooms is a gift the Island’s policymakers can give to children and teens.