France banned phones for the whole school day in 2018

The short answer

Since 2018, French law has told nursery, primary and lower-secondary schools that mobile phones are banned during the whole school day, not only in lessons, while leaving each school to decide exactly how the ban is enforced and what pedagogical exceptions it allows.

What the evidence says

Law No. 2018-698 of 3 August 2018, on the regulation of mobile phone use in schools, amended France's Education Code. According to the published text of the law, the new article states that use of a mobile phone or any other terminal communications equipment by a pupil is prohibited in nursery schools, primary schools and colleges, and during any teaching-related activity taking place outside the school premises, except for circumstances, notably pedagogical uses, and places where the school's internal rules expressly authorise it, with a separate allowance for equipment that pupils with disabilities or health conditions are authorised to use. Lycees, the upper-secondary schools for older teenagers, are not covered by this blanket prohibition and may instead include their own phone restrictions in their internal rules. The National Assembly's legislative dossier confirms the law was promulgated on 3 August 2018 and published in the Official Journal on 5 August 2018, and records that the bill moved during its passage from an initial focus on outright prohibition toward a framework of usage rules for schools to apply.

For context

The law's text sets the legal boundary of the ban; it does not itself present evaluation evidence about whether the ban changed attendance, behaviour or attainment, and this entry does not claim outcome data the law's own text does not contain. Because implementation is delegated to each school's internally adopted rules, "the French phone ban" in practice means a range of local rules sharing the same legal floor, some stricter than the statute requires and others closer to its minimum. A comparison with a different country's approach, such as England's guidance, should note that France's rule is a statute amending the Education Code, a different legal status from guidance a school can depart from without breaching a specific enacted provision.

A practical next step

If your child attends a French primary or lower-secondary school, the school's internal rules, usually available from the school or its website, are the document that actually tells you how the ban works day to day, including exceptions and how confiscated phones are returned.

• Does my child's school's internal rules permit any pedagogical exception to the phone ban, and how is that decided?
• How does the school handle confiscation and return of a device if a rule is broken?
• If my child is moving from a college to a lycee, does the phone rule change, and has the new school published its own policy?

The 2018 law set a national floor rather than a single uniform practice, so understanding how it affects a particular child means reading the school's own rules alongside the statute rather than assuming every French school implements the ban identically.