Good evening and welcome to the Pompey Politics Podcast, the show where we discuss national, local and

international issues in a calm, balanced and reasonable way to get to the heart of the matter.

I'm Ian Tiny Morris.

And I'm Simon Sandsbury.

Apologies for the little delay at the start there, Simon.

I missed the intro music and was feeling about in the dark for a minute.

But if only I would have had a smartphone to help me,

which is an almost seamless segue like a rhinoceros in a china shop into tonight's episode.

It is.

Yes.

So today we are asking the question, should smartphones be banned from classrooms or indeed

from children under a certain age from having them or should there be legislation preventing

children from accessing social media, for example?

So we've got some experts to share their views and to talk to us about what's actually

happening in today's classrooms, because you might have guessed that it's been a little

while since Ian and I were actually in one as a recipient of education.

Sorry, Ian, I'll let that one go.

And it would be interesting to know what's actually happening.

So, yeah, just to give us an idea of what is really kind of happening around the world,

several countries have actually banned the use of mobile phones in primary and secondary

schools, so France, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil, even Rwanda has banned them.

China's banned them since 2021 without schools being brought onto school premises without written parental consent.

...