‘The crux of all evil': what happened to the first city that tried to ban smartphones for under-14s?

The Guardian

07-05-2025

At 3.12pm on a sunny spring afternoon in St Albans, Yasser Afghen reaches for the iPhone in his jeans pocket, hoping to use the three minutes before his son emerges from his year 1 primary class to scroll through his emails. As he lifts the phone to his face, Matthew Tavender, the head teacher of Cunningham Hill school, strides across the playground towards him. Afghen smiles apologetically, puts his phone away, and spends the remaining waiting time listening to the birdsong in the trees behind the school yard.
A one-storey 1960s block with 14 classrooms backing on to a playing field, Cunningham Hill primary feels like an unlikely hub for a revolution. But a year ago, Tavender and the school's executive head, Justine Elbourne-Cload, began coordinating with the heads at other primary schools across the city, then sent a joint letter to parents and carers across St Albans: the highly addictive nature of smartphones was having a lasting effect on children's brains. The devices were robbing children of their childhood. Could parents, the letter asked, please avoid giving them smartphones until they turned 14?
One of the fathers who received the letter was Matt Adams, the founder and editor of the St Albans Times, who wrote an article highlighting the initiative. The story was picked up nationally ('St Albans wants to be the first smartphone-free city for under-14s,' said the Times), and then internationally. People in Singapore, Australia and South Africa all heard about an ambitious attempt by parents and teachers in a small suburban city, 23 miles from central London, to fight off the reach of global tech companies.
A year later, it's clear that St Albans is still far from a smartphone-free city for under-14s. And yet, something small and potentially significant has shifted.
In December 2023, when Tavender did a survey of his year 6 pupils (aged 10-11), 45 of 60 pupils already had smartphones – 75%. A year later, this has dropped to just seven – 12%. A similarly stark drop has been noted by heads at other schools in the city. His aim is for this trend to continue. In fact, he hopes that the smartphone resistance movement accompanies his primary schoolchildren into secondary school, so that in time the sight of a child carrying a smartphone in St Albans will trigger a frisson of shock, akin to the vision of a child with a cigarette.
When Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was published last year, Tavender was immediately receptive. Haidt, an American social psychologist, notes that depression and anxiety for adolescents in the US rose by more than 50% between 2010 and 2019, with a 131% increase in the suicide rate for girls aged 10-14; he argues that the 'new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood'.
Tavender was already worried by the rapidly changing nature of the problems he and his colleagues were facing. Most dispiriting, he says, was having to deal with law enforcement. Fifteen years ago, when he started teaching at the school, it would have been unthinkable for a teacher to have to talk to the police and families about the sharing of a nude image.
View image in fullscreen
'It's the girls who are struggling more.' Photograph:Out of sensitivity to the children involved, he is vague about the incident that caused the school the biggest headache, but explains that a photo had been taken as a joke, and was quickly shared with a large number of people. The school spent hours ringing up dozens of parents. 'It wasn't done in a sexual way … it was just boys mucking about. There was no malice in it. But it was sent very widely around St Albans. Once it's sent, it's sent everywhere. We had to say: 'Please check your child's phone – you need to delete that image,'' he says. 'It was awful for the families.'
During informal conversations with primary school heads across the city, he was learning that his colleagues were confronting similar problems. 'Everyone has experienced something, either with police involvement, or other agencies. Teachers at infant schools are dealing with children watching inappropriate content as young as five and six,' he says.
He also had a more general sense that behaviours were changing, even among the school's younger pupils. He has noticed more body image concerns, more pupils worrying about monitoring their steps and talking about calorie-counting apps. Teachers have recorded greater levels of school avoidance. 'A few years ago we didn't see this at all; now, it's not huge numbers but we have seven or eight children who really struggle to be in school.' He sees this as the combined result of Covid and children's increasingly screen-based childhood.
He was concerned, too, about declining concentration. 'It's the TikTok brain.' Sats preparation study sessions have had to be broken up into shorter chunks to allow children to cope, he says. Haidt also writes of fragmented attention spans, warning of the opportunity cost of time wasted responding to streams of content from friends and unknown people online, posting material in a never-ending quest for likes; children, he argues, become less adept at reading facial cues, and more reliant on the simplicity of emotions expressed through emojis. The outrage cycles of social media push children quickly into a defensive mode, he writes, while online lives make them more vulnerable to public shaming.
In the classroom, teachers are also finding that 'We get a lot more 'nos'. If a child is playing [an online] game, they can turn it off and start again if they don't win. If they're watching something on YouTube and they don't like it, they move on to something else. They're used to getting immediate feedback, generally positive, and if they don't get it they can just swipe and move on. We're seeing children with less resilience to things they don't want to do,' he says. At one meeting I attended, he told the parents that executives in Silicon Valley don't let their children access social media. 'They know something we don't know,' he says.
Last February, he heard a radio interview with a primary head teacher in Dorset talking about a campaign to encourage parents to give their children 'brick' phones; he called him to ask for advice and was put in touch with the newly launched Smartphone Free Childhood movement, an initiative set up by parents in Suffolk, which campaigns for a ban on social media for children under 16 and a ban on smartphones for children under 14.
View image in fullscreen
'We're seeing children with less resilience to things they don't want to do' … Matthew Tavender. Photograph: Anselm Ebulue/The Guardian
Then, in May, at the start of the summer term, Tavender and his colleague Elbourne-Cload convened a parents' meeting. 'It was the most well-attended meeting we've ever had,' he says. 'About 80 people turned up; normally we get about 40 to 50. We tagged it on to the end of a meeting about reading – which is the most critical thing in primary education – and just eight people turned up to that one.' The teacher who was leading the reading session was disconcerted to see crowds of parents outside the door, all staring at their phones, waiting for the meeting about phone use.
One father interrupted the presentation to accuse the teachers of being anti-tech, Tavender tells me, but mostly there was a sense of optimism that the parents could do something to translate their sense of latent worry into positive action. In the absence of help from the government or action by tech firms, they felt suddenly empowered. A few days after the meeting, the St Albans primary schools consortium sent out their letter.
The schools were already smartphone-free areas, the letter explained, but the idea was to 'change the 'normal' age that children are given smartphones'. 'By 'smartphones', we refer to phones that are able to access the internet, as opposed to mobile phones that can only text and make phone calls.' Parents should 'resist pressure' from their children, and work together to 'reset the expectation and remove social peer pressure'.
The letter ended with an emotive plea: 'Our children's futures are so important, to you and to us. In a world where fast-changing technology is actually impacting the development of our children's brains, it is up to us to stand up for them, and their futures. If not us, then who? Yours faithfully, St Albans Primary Headteachers.'
A month later, last June, I went to a second after-school meeting, for parents who had been unable to make the first one. Tavender, with his grey V-neck jumper (an adult version of school uniform), grey trousers and greying beard, is not an obviously revolutionary figure. He talks about his fondness for watching golf. His delivery style is a bit wearily monotone, as if he's reminding the room for the 15th time of what he considers to be acceptable behaviour in the lunch queue. So his presentation is not in the least rabble-rousing, but somehow the parents are totally gripped.
'When you're ready for your child to stop being a child, give them a smartphone,' he tells them, running them through a series of slides provided by Smartphone Free Childhood. 'WhatsApp is the crux of all evil, in my mind.' Particularly worrying were the recent changes to the app's settings, allowing users to create bigger groups. He had noticed children taking part in a 'first to 1,000 challenge', which involves trying to create huge group chats. Photographs get shared with ever-widening circles of people; no one really knows who else is in the group.
'We've had issues with children being asked for indecent photos at 10 years old. We've had instances where someone adds an older cousin, who then adds another friend who then starts posting pornography, violent crimes,' he says. 'We cannot manage that as parents. But we also can't say we can't do anything about it, because we can.'
View image in fullscreen
'Some parents have refused to send their kids to school for a week when a phone was confiscated.' Photograph: Maskot/Getty Images
Outside the windows of the big assembly hall, the low sound of cooing wood pigeons is audible. The deserted residential streets smell of lavender and roses, with a faint undertone of wood smoke; ivy is growing up the telephone pylons. But for all the semi-rural calm, there is no escape here from the headaches of modern parenting.
'When we were at school, at least when we went home the bullies couldn't get us there; now you can't get away from it,' Tavender says. 'I'm not trying to go back to the halcyon days of proper bullying where we got beaten up and got given wedgies,' he adds, prompting a few snorts of laughter. 'It's the girls who are struggling more. Phones seem massively more negative for girls.'
Most powerful is his readiness to talk about his own struggles. 'I'm addicted to my phone. I absolutely am.' He admits that he and his wife, also a teacher, now regret giving their daughter a phone when she moved to secondary school. He describes an evening a few months earlier when he was watching golf on television, while also playing with his phone; his wife was next to him watching a film on her iPad, and also texting friends; his daughter was drawing on a Chromebook, while messaging on her phone. He tells them this to reassure parents that he isn't judging them. 'There were three of us on six devices. We didn't talk for two hours. We've got to model better behaviour to our children.'
By the end of the meeting, many parents have agreed to become ambassadors and work to persuade fellow parents to sign the Smartphone Free Childhood pact, in which they promise to delay purchasing their child a smartphone until they turn 14. Campaigners would like to see access to social media sites – Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok – restricted until 16. There are already age verification processes, but the rules are poorly enforced: most platforms have a minimum age of 13, but six in 10 children aged eight to 12 who use them are signed up with their own profile. A recent Children's Commissioner report found that the 69% of children aged eight to 15 spend up to three hours a day using an internet-enabled device, while 23% spend more than four hours on them.
Will Ashton, who runs a digital marketing agency in London, and who also has a son in year 4 and another in year 2, has taken on responsibility for a lot of the campaigning. He is well aware that the success of the movement depends on the rapid reach made possible by Instagram and WhatsApp, the apps the parents most mistrust. 'One of the ironies of this is that I've never spent more time on my phone,' he says. He would like parents to hold off on getting their children smartphones until 16, arguing that smartphone use should be seen as an adult pursuit, like drinking, smoking or driving.
His children are allowed time on iPads, with carefully curated parental controls. 'I haven't heard a counterargument yet that feels compelling. This isn't anti-technology. It's about allowing children to have access to material that is appropriate for their age.'
Adams, the local newspaper editor who turned the original letter into a global story, was also already uneasy about smartphone use among children. He had noticed how footage of a recent machete stabbing outside a local college, featuring crowds of identifiable teenagers, had gone viral. A few weeks later, at his daughter's school, there had been a suicide attempt; teachers tried to handle the issue with discretion, but by the end of the school day, pupils had shared the details with each other over WhatsApp. 'I didn't want to be having conversations about these things with a 12-year-old,' he says.
He feels proud of the enormous attention his original article has drawn to the campaign (and mildly irritated that his publication was never credited). And he understands why an affluent city such as St Albans is leading on the issue. 'It's a bubble: it voted overwhelmingly against Brexit. It has a very educated, erudite, informed population.'
In 2024, St Albans was voted the second-best place to live in England. A separate poll last year named the Suffolk town of Woodbridge as the happiest place to live in Britain. The two towns are current hubs for the Smartphone Free Childhood movement. Woodbridge residents Daisy Greenwell and her husband, Joe Ryrie, launched their campaign in February 2024, after Greenwell wrote an emotional Instagram post urging fellow parents to delay giving phones to their children.
The movement publishes a leader board showing which counties and which schools are doing best at collecting parental pledges. So far the highest take-up has been in London and the home counties; Cunningham Hill school, where more than 50% of parents have signed the pledge, is one of the most engaged schools in the country. (Although Tavender says that his school is not hugely affluent, its targeted funding for disadvantaged students, the so-called pupil premium, is allocated to only 20% of the roll.)
View image in fullscreen
'St Albans has a very informed population' … editor of the St Albans Times, Matt Adams. Photograph: Anselm Ebulue/The Guardian
'It's not surprising that middle-class parents are the ones who've got more time to think deeply about this stuff; it's probably nearer the top of their worries list than it might be for a lot of parents,' Ryrie says. Campaigners recognise that for families who don't have money for separate wifi access, or to buy laptops or other alternative screens for children's homework, a smartphone ban can seem a peculiar luxury. But Ryrie argues that research suggests disadvantaged children suffer more from uncontrolled access to the internet; Haidt writes that a child's average screen time and social media use rises in single-parent and low-income families. Without further regulation, there could be a risk of a 'digital divide between kids who are exposed to the online world without guardrails and parents who have more time to monitor their children's use,' Ryrie says.
When Jamie Oliver campaigned for healthier school dinners a decade ago, some parents passed their children burgers and chips through the school railings, but this campaign hasn't triggered much opposition. No parent is that sad to be told they shouldn't rush to spend hundreds of pounds on an item that may introduce years of rows over screen time; even among parents who haven't read or heard of Haidt, there's a growing understanding of the risks of smartphones. 'I don't think there are many less controversial topics in Britain today,' Ryrie says.
A few weeks after the primary school heads in St Albans announced their smartphone-free goal, headteachers from 18 out of the 20 secondary schools in Southwark, south London, said they were collaborating to dissuade parents from buying children smartphones before year 10 (aged 14 or 15) at the earliest. Jessica West, headteacher of Ark Walworth academy, said teachers were being forced to take action, in the absence of effective legislation. 'Many requests for stronger measures have been made to big tech companies but action is woefully slow and that leaves our children at risk,' she said.
In July 2024, Eton said it would be giving its first-year boarders (aged 13) basic brick phones that could only send and receive texts. In February 2025, 103 primary schools in Barnet, north London, announced that smartphones would no longer be allowed on the premises and 23 secondary schools in the borough said they were committed to removing smartphones entirely from the school day. Smartphone Free Childhood's message had spread quickly beyond St Albans and Woodbridge.
Six months after the Southwark initiative was announced, Mike Baxter, head at City of London academy, said pupils had been issued with mandatory phone pouches. Any pupil found with a smartphone out of its pouch and switched on would have it confiscated for a week. 'We're confiscating about 15 a week,' he says. The school is doing random bag searches. 'You have to rigorously implement it.' Next year, the school will prohibit ownership of smartphones for all children in year 7; any child who comes to school with one will have it removed for a month. Year by year this policy will continue rolling upwards, to years 8 and then 9.
Some of the students have protested, but the sanctions are severe. 'If a child refuses to hand their phone in, they go to our reintegration room. If they come in the next day with a different phone, then we say: you're back in the reintegration room.'
There has been anger from a few parents, who have refused to send their children into school for the entire week when the phone was confiscated; on a couple of occasions, parents have come into the school and taken school property – a school iPad, a radio – which they've held as ransom, asking the school to return their child's phone. 'In both situations, we've just called the police,' he says. 'You have to relentlessly follow it through.'
Very few teachers argue in favour of phones. In a letter to the Guardian last month, one teacher described the movement to ban phones in schools as 'disappointing', arguing that staff should help students learn how to use digital devices to learn to 'think critically and navigate online spaces filled with disinformation supercharged by artificial intelligence'. But his is a minority voice. 'Everyone accepts there's a major problem,' Baxter says.
Among some of Tavender's older pupils there is a wistful regret that the school's campaigning zeal has meant that they will not be getting a smartphone any time soon. Julia Laurence, who sells advertising space for publishing, has told her 10-year-old daughter that she won't be getting a phone before she's 14. 'She's got this idea that once you start walking home from school alone, you get a phone. But all the parents in her class have agreed, none of them will get a phone. It's made it so much easier for us,' she says. Her daughter told anyone who would listen that it was an extremely unfair development. Her mother shrugs. 'It's something I've been worried about probably since she was born. I feel like we're the ones making the change.'
View image in fullscreen
'I've worried about it since my daughter was born' ... Julia Laurence. Photograph: Anselm Ebulue/The Guardian
George Dill, 10, and his brother Thomas, eight, have also been told by their parents, Graham and Rachel, both school teachers, that they won't be getting smartphones until they are at least 14 and ideally not until they are 16. When I meet them in their home, they are standing on the sofa in the sitting room waving golf clubs around, playing a hazardous indoor putting game with their father. When I ask them if they'd like to have a smartphone, their eyes flick instantly towards their parents. 'Sort of,' George says.
'What would you say, if I said I was going to buy you one tomorrow?' his father asks.
'I would think you might actually be lying,' George replies.
Thomas says his father spends too long on his phone, when he should be doing things like playing football with them. He screws up his eyes, lifting his hands to his face, and mimicks a man manically twiddling his thumbs on an imaginary phone.
'I'm not too overly impressed by my own phone use,' Graham agrees; he resents the frequency with which he is messaged by his employers, often late at night or around 6am.
He has resisted letting his sons have screens even during long car journeys; during a recent seven-hour drive to Cornwall, they played a protracted game where they scored points for shooting white Teslas with guns made from their fingers. 'The most amazing ideas in history come from boredom. Every time your phone goes ping it takes maybe two minutes to recover full concentration.'
'There should be a time limit for different ages,' Thomas says. 'The point is that if you don't have a phone, you don't have square eyes.'
A year after St Albans primary heads launched their campaign, plenty has happened to shift their movement to something more mainstream. The television series Adolescence attracted renewed political attention to the dangers of hidden online bullying. About 99.8% of primary schools and 90% of secondary schools have now instituted a ban on smartphone use in school hours. The government is in the process of implementing the 2023 Online Safety Act: a series of rules around social media, search and gaming apps and websites will come into force on 25 July. Ofcom says this should prevent young people from encountering the most harmful content relating to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography (although campaign groups believe the regulations do not go far enough). The parent-power model of the Smartphone Free Childhood movement has sparked 32 offshoots globally – from Kazakhstan and Nigeria to Costa Rica.
But a quick walk around St Albans suggests that there may not yet have been a fundamental shift. Teenagers in school uniform queueing up for hot drinks in the city centre after school awkwardly balance iPhones, school bags and coffee cups. Nationally, Virgin Media O2 reported a doubling in sales of brick phones last October, which they attributed to parental concerns over online safety. But in the St Albans Three mobile store, the three courteous shop assistants know nothing about the campaign to free St Albans' under-14s from smartphones. 'It tends to be mostly elderly people that ask about brick phones,' one salesperson says. They estimate that the average age of a child getting a phone from their parents is still about 11, when they switch to secondary school.
View image in fullscreen
Leading on the issue ... St Albans. Photograph: eye35/Alamy
In a Hollywood version of the St Albans story, there would be a triumphant ending, perhaps with parents hiring a steamroller to crunch their children's tech, or with teachers facilitating a penitent visit from the founders of WhatsApp, who fly over from California to visit pupils and parents at Cunningham Hill, offering their apologies in a drizzly playground. Tavender, played by Martin Freeman, would be feted for his David and Goliath-style success, just as Alan Bates was when the Post Office scandal was televised. I'm not sure that production companies will be in a bidding race for the rights to this story quite yet.
But as well as celebrating the fall in smartphone ownership in year 6 from 75% to 12%, Tavender is delighted that the number of parents buying children smartphones has also dropped in lower years. In December 2023, 30% of year 5 students had smartphones; a year later this had dropped to 4.8% – just three children. He thinks the movement will expand organically. 'It will take a few years to really show the impact.' He has also noticed fewer parents ignoring their children at pickup time in favour of their mobiles.
But he is disappointed that secondary schools in the city have not signed up to take a similarly coordinated approach, although most of them do now have clear restrictions on smartphone use. He's aware that this is a movement that has taken off in the south-east mostly; he says colleagues in York and Middlesbrough have barely heard of the Smartphone Free Childhood movement. He regrets the failure of tech companies to do more to protect children and is mournful that government smartphone initiatives have been watered down.
But mostly he feels happy to have played a small part in beginning to shift mindsets. 'Overall it's been a success, but it's a long journey,' he says.
Outside in the playground the father of a nine-year-old girl quietly admits he has only this week bought her a sim card to use in a secondhand smartphone. He works in a restaurant and he and his wife both work shifts; sometimes their daughter has to wait by herself for them to get home. He has rows with his teenage son about screen time, but he feels it's a necessity for his daughter. 'I hate the ding, ding noise of alerts from his friends. His TikTok use is killing me,' he says. 'But there are reasons why she needs one. Sometimes she's home alone for 20 minutes. You have to be practical.'
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [e-mail] or [e-mail]. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org