Mobile phones help secondary pupils

ASK a teacher to name the most irritating invention of recent years and they will often nominate the mobile phone.

Exasperated by the distractions and problems they create, many head teachers have ordered that pupils must keep their phones switched off at school. Others have told pupils to leave them at home.

However, education researchers at The University of Nottingham believe it is time that phone bans were reassessed - because mobile phones can be a powerful learning aid, they say.

Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young and her colleagues have reached this conclusion after studying the consequences of allowing pupils in five secondary schools to use either their own mobile phones or the new generation of ‘smartphones’ in lessons.