Most of the time when you see a young person on their phone, do you jump to the conclusion that they’re just wasting time?

Or maybe you assume they’re planning their next ram raid or whatever.

Well if that’s you, then you will love National’s plan to ban mobile phones in all schools. No ifs or buts. No phones at lunchtime. No phones during recess. No phones at school. That’s what’s going to happen if National is in government after the election in October.

Which I think is one of those ideas that sounds great but what a nightmare to make happen.

It sounds great - to someone like me anyway - because I’m as guilty as the next person of thinking that anytime a kid’s on their phone, they’re not doing anything useful.

And that’s what National is tapping into with this policy. It wants to appeal to the likes of me - and maybe you too.

Because, if you’ve got kids at home - teenagers especially - you’ll know how infuriating it can be when you see them smiling at something on their phone when you know they should be getting on with that assignment or studying for their next exam. Or maybe even doing something useful around the place.

I reckon if they ever did research to find out what parents say to their kids most these days, it would probably be “put that bloody phone down”.

So imagine what it must be like for teachers with 30 kids in the room and trying to get them to focus on what they should be focused on. Trickier for the teachers too because they’d be hauled off to the Teaching Council if they told a student to “put the bloody phone down”.

National says the reason it wants to ban phones in schools is because it thinks it would help sort out the situation with fewer kids leaving school with NCEA Level 2 and above now, than 10 years ago.

It’s saying today that, if the kids weren’t so distracted on their phones, more of them would be doing better at school. But I don’t know if you could get a more simplistic view of the world if you tried.

Because what about the kids who aren’t doing well at school because they go home every day to a completely dysfunctional living arrangement? What about the kids who aren’t doing well at school because the system has let them down time and time again and no one’s clicked that they might be dyslexic or something. Or it was picked up so late that they’re going to be playing catch-up forever.

What about those kids? Banning phones at school isn’t going to make any difference to them.

Or the ones who had to go out and find a job during the pandemic because they’re parents lost their jobs during the lockdowns - and, because of that, they’ve just dropped out of the system.

I know for some people that’s hard to believe. But that is reality for some kids and their families.

And how rich would it be, do you think, for us to tell the kids they can’t have their phones with them at school, when they see us staring into the things all the time ourselves? When they see us on our phones when we’re doing things like driving? Talk about hypocritical.

Another thing too is whether parents would be happy for the kids not to be contactable during the school day. Because, as a society, we’ve fallen for the line that being able to contact the kids all the time, anytime is a good thing.

National says if phones were banned and parents needed to contact their kids during school hours, they could just call the school office. Can you imagine that?

It would also be putting it on schools to determine how to enforce the no-phone rule. One of the ways it’s suggesting is getting the kids to hand their phones in at the start of the day. But what would the likes of Burnside High School or Cashmere High School do with more than 2,000 phones?

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