English school phone bans tracked with higher test scores

The short answer

Test scores rose at English schools after they banned mobile phones, and the gain was concentrated almost entirely among lower-achieving students, with little measurable change for the strongest performers. That pattern suggests phones were mainly distracting the students most vulnerable to distraction, rather than dragging every student down equally.

What the evidence says

Economists Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy surveyed high schools in four English cities, Birmingham, London, Leicester and Manchester, in spring 2013 about their mobile phone policies, and received usable responses from 91 schools. They combined those survey responses with administrative records of age-16 exam results (GCSEs) from 2001 to 2011, and used a difference-in-differences design, comparing how each school's own results changed after it introduced a ban with how similar schools without a ban changed over the same period. Their working paper, later published in Labour Economics in August 2016, found that in their preferred specification, introducing a phone ban was associated with a 6.41% of a standard deviation gain in test scores on average. That average masked a sharp split: low-achieving students gained 14.23% of a standard deviation, a large effect in education research, while high-achieving students showed no significant change either way.

For context

A difference-in-differences design is a stronger basis for a causal claim than a simple before-and-after comparison, because it accounts for trends that would have happened anyway, but it still relies on schools that banned phones being otherwise similar to those that did not, an assumption the authors tested using prior test scores and student characteristics. The study covers a specific policy, cities and time period, English secondary schools between 2001 and 2011, before smartphones and social media reached their current saturation, so the size of any similar effect today is not guaranteed to match. The authors themselves frame the result carefully: a ban is a low-cost policy that appears to reduce inequality in outcomes between students, not a universal fix for attention or achievement.

A practical next step

If a phone ban is being discussed for a school or classroom, you could ask what happens for the specific students who are already struggling, since that is where this study found nearly all of the measured benefit concentrated.

• Would a ban's benefit, on this evidence, be expected to reach a high-achieving student at all?
• Is the school prepared to compare its own results before and after, the way this study did?
• What replaces the phone's social function at break times, since the ban addressed classroom use specifically?

The clearest lesson from this study is not that phones are uniquely harmful, but that their cost fell unevenly, and that an intervention this size did more for the students who had the most to gain.