Edinburgh’s public consultation on restricting mobile phones in schools closes on Monday, March 2, and the council is urging parents, pupils, and staff to make their views known before the deadline. The five week consultation follows a decision by councillors in September 2025 to introduce phone restrictions in all primary schools and explore similar measures for secondary schools.
Councillor James Dalgleish, the education convener, said: “While we have had a positive response so far, it is really important that we hear the views of parents, carers, teachers and school staff and crucially the perspectives of our pupils.”
Pilot schemes using lockable pouches at Queensferry and Portobello High Schools have been “broadly successful” according to anecdotal evidence. The council wants to move forward with a potential rollout to other schools “as soon as it is practical to do so.”
The debate over phones in schools has been rumbling across Scotland and the UK for years. The Scottish Government has given headteachers powers to ban phones, and Edinburgh is now trying to work out what that looks like in practice. The arguments on both sides are well rehearsed: phones are a distraction from learning and a source of bullying on one hand; they are a safety tool and a fact of modern life on the other.
The lockable pouch approach is interesting because it removes the confrontation of confiscation while keeping the phones physically present. Whether it works at scale across Edinburgh’s secondary schools is what this consultation is trying to establish. Surveys are available through the City of Edinburgh Council’s consultation hub, with separate versions for parents, pupils, and staff.