Legislation to ban the personal use of phone sin schools has been proposed by Independent Senators
Ireland looks set to follow in the footsteps of France, and ban students from the personal use of their smart phones during school hours.
This comes after legislation was proposed by Independent Senators Billy Lawless, Victor Boyhan and Gerard Craughwell - requesting students submit their mobile phones at the start of the school day, to be collected at the end of the school day.
The proposed new law was trialed in a Kerry school where students in their 6th class were banned from using mobile phones and social media both in school and at home.
And now it looks as though that experiment is on the way to being passed as a law.
According to the Oireachtas website, the description of the new bill is as follows:
''Bill entitled an Act to regulate the use of digital devices in primary and secondary schools subject to the discretionary educational uses provided for in the act and to put in place a code of behaviour on digital device usage implemented by the board of management and teachers by which student possession of digital devices will be prohibited during school hours for the purposes of reducing the harmful impact on academic performance and the social and emotional well-being of children.''
Meanwhile, Victor Boyhan from RTE News said that ''the aim of the proposed legislation to strike a balance between the benefits of the use for technology for educational purposes, and the negative effects of unsupervised use of devices.'''
