Group of 17 London secondary schools join up to go smartphone-free(theguardian.com) |
Group of 17 London secondary schools join up to go smartphone-free(theguardian.com) |
Story old as time.
Fascinating that people here cant predict it.
At some point a child will get abducted on their way home from school, or be unable to contact emergency services, because the school confiscated their phone.
They seem to want parents to buy dumb phones instead for their children. Can you imagine trying to text “I’m being followed by someone on XYZ road” on a Nokia-style keyboard? Do dumb phones support sending GPS coordinates to emergency services like smartphones do?
Even mundane things like what if a child’s train gets cancelled and they need to check Google Maps to find an alternative way home.
The schools posit that the social and educational benefits of no smartphones outweigh the (purported) risks of an un-nannied childhood.
I’m a grown adult and I wouldn’t feel comfortable walking around London in the dark without a smartphone.
Taking a phone away from an 11 year old before they walk back home in the dark is unhinged, it’s not hyperbolic to say that or a sign of addiction.
Also, there is a thing about developing social skills to be able to do small things like asking for directions/help.
what do you think the world looked like 15 years ago? the 1-week is a punitive punishment. you know you can't have this. you deliberately chose to use it. if you get it back at the end of the day, so what? you've lost nothing. you wouldn't have been able to use it during school anyway.
The UK has no sense of personal autonomy. Culturally no limits on controlling people to suit authority preference.
why does a student have the right to bring a banned object to a class and keep it? you would instead suspend the student? who do you think prefers that to confiscation? the student? the parent? teacher?
Can we talk about this for a minute? Suppose a big guy or a group of guys see you walking in London in the dark and decide to do you violence. What is the main way a smartphone can help you in your opinion? By giving you a chance to get photos of them? By helping you get emergency medical help after they beat you up?
I'm genuinely curious, not just trying to score points.
Is there some danger other than violence from strangers that you think the smartphone will help you with?
There is a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. NYU Prof. Jonathan Haidt argues that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting have led to a "rewiring" of childhood and a rise in mental illness. Suicides for both teenage girls and boys are up.
I’m choosing to send my kids to a school whose parents have also agreed to remove or drastically curb the use of social media. Not eliminate the creative sense of electronic tinkering.
In the mean time, I'll try to bring him to hiking, camping and other outdoor activities. If he is very into electronics then I'll introduce gaming and programming.
I'm also considering a no smartphone policy for myself. I cannot persuade my wife who is deep into scrolling hell already, sadly.
It seems that once you send the kids to school, you no longer have full control over these things.
The friction is too big if you're the only parent with this policy. That's why "multiple schools join up" is a good thing.
Where they're at an age before knowing FPS, MMOs they will have tons of fun jumping up and collecting words.
Word Rescue, Maths Rescue the Fun School series all hold weight to name a few.
Just because the old don't have hyper-ai-raytracing graphics doesn't mean they're not playable for the younger generations.
He can be reactionary, and I don't agree with all of his views. But he is spot on about the negtive effect of smartphones and social media.
This what I explain to our kids and they understand it very well.
I'm all in favor of letting kids make mistakes rather than trying to stop them from doing everything, and that past a certain point, your attempts to filter what they consume are doomed in most environments.
But to the best of my ability to judge, not exposing children to unfiltered 0-friction instant gratification for some number of years is going to be somewhat practically necessary to allow them to develop enough experience with longer-term reward seeking to make such decisions based on actual information about the rewards versus just picking the easy button every time.
Otherwise, we've all seen the portrayals for many centuries before cell phones of what happens when you have people who have never had to do long-term planning for significant rewards, and are bored of the lack of texture in just taking the easy hit every time. Cell phones have just commoditized failing the marshmellow experiment.
For me I don’t mind her running around in a forest school or climbing on trees. Modern playgrounds are surprisingly sterile and overly safe.
My oldest is only 7 right now but I'm also seriously considering middle and high school options for him that severely restrict phone use. We play Minecraft on the weekends, he does MakeCode Arcade coding tutorials, and occasionally gets (heavily supervised) YouTube time. I don't think he's missing out on opportunities to become skilled with computers.
I think that shows that indeed it should be a rule, voluntary will not work because of something akin to the network effect.
When we get interns at our company many of them, instead of communicating with us are in their phones during lunch and coffee breaks. It’s a disease, they don’t integrate, they don’t learn being social around collegeas. I don’t like most people of that generation and they never get to know me. Something has to change.
Yes. Kids are tuned in to the negative effect of phones/social media on themselves, don't want them, but feel they can't not have them because … everyone else is on them.
This is more about social media, but a research report [1] quoted by Jonathan Haidt in conversation with Tyler Cowen [2] expresses this:
"Users would need to BE PAID $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts."
BUT
"Users would be willing to PAY $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively."
Emphasis mine on the above two quotes.
[1] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-produ... [2] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-a...
I wonder what a poll of those students would actually show
The one school my son went to that had a "must be left at home" policy, I think went slightly too far (many students there had a complex travel route, and parents wanted to be able to check in if e.g. they were running late), but at the other ones having them lock it in a locker or hand it in at the door didn't see to be an issue for either the students or parents, nor did many students seem to want to risk detention for taking their phone out of the bag without good reason at the school were that was policy.
this one is just so funny to me. dumbphone argument aside, what do these parents think happened when they, themselves, were running late from school? somehow, their parents managed without a direct, 24/7 line.
not so today in suburbia
But once smartphones came around they replaced those dumbphones and snuck in through the same policies, but in reality they're a completely different category from dumbphones.
When an immigrant who was handcuffed and tazed subsequently died in Canada, the investigation started asking questions about the use of tazers. They wanted to see the testing and data that showed they were not lethal or long-term harmful for use on humans.
It turns out no such testing had ever been done. Companies just started making them, so Police forces started buying them and using them on people. To this day there is no data about the consequences of using them.
Same thing for smartphones in schools and a TON of other things in our world.
None of those things were allowed out of your locker from the moment you got to school until you left.
Children having smartphones in class is a significant deviation from the norm.
> The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.
In my experience as a parent, this is nothing new. Until last year one of my children went to a very large secondary school in the UK (not in London though). The above was the rule for all of the seven years they were at the school: if you kept your phone out of sight and set to dnd then you were ok, but if it was visible then it was confiscated. My impression as a parent is that it was reasonably well observed by students and enforced by staff.
Context: We have an election here in the UK in ~2 weeks and phones in schools have been a minor moral panic issue that some of the parties are trying to use to assert their education credentials. I'm not saying there is no problem with children and phones - I believe there is - but theres a reason its getting attention at the moment.
As I said in another comment, I'm more surprised Southwark had this many schools without restrictions, unless this has been exaggerated and many of them already had restrictions anyway and so no reason not to sign up to this...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/62d1643e8fa8f...
Some things that concern me:
- Page 19: Staff may examine any data or files on an electronic device they have confiscated as a result of a search, as defined in paragraph 57, if there is good reason to do so.
- Page 20: In determining whether there is a ‘good reason’ to examine the data or files, the member of staff should reasonably suspect that the data or file on the device has been, or could be used, to cause harm, undermine the safe environment of the school and disrupt teaching, or be used to commit an offence.
It also doesn't seem to lay out a limit on the duration for which a device can be confiscated - which makes confiscation for a week look a bit like a grey area to me. Would love to hear from anyone with more experience on this area.
Denver's public school system (DPS) is a bit unique, just FYI. All public schools are chartered, including the DSSTs. Meaning that all guardians are required to select the school that they want their kids to go to, there are no defaults. All kids get free bus passes on municipal transport. As is usual in Colorado public schooling, things get really law-y as the city and school district lines cross over county lines (cities are not entirely within counties in CO).
https://berkeleyhighjacket.com/2023/news/bhs-teachers-unify-...
The hope that stopping phones in school will help the mental health issues that children are facing today is a ridiculous hallucination. The second paragraph of the article states "in the hope of also addressing the downsides of their use outside the school gates". Hoping for a better result is not enough.
Phones enable a level of socialisation, both positive and negative, on a scale that people who finished school as recently as five years ago will not understand. My child is a product of the covid-taught secondary schoolers and has very complex relationships with communication technology.
It is not about the phones in school. It is about games, apps, social media, media, influencing, content creation, filters, pr0n, spam, bots, AI, news. Those same platforms and tools are used to bully, shame, abuse, and stalk. Whatsapp 'in' groups allow social inclusion and exclusion at a pace that would never have happened at the same rate as before. You can be in and out of a group in seconds. You can feel the pressure to have to 'engage' at 2am. The phones are the problem, but switching them off while at school will make no difference.
By all means, let those schools trial it and give us the data. Adjust the results levels of family income, ethnic background, previous mental-health issues. I doubt we will see a drop in cases of teenage depression, self-harm, and suicide.
The UK (and many other education systems) have a pattern of 'parental blame'. For many educators, if a child kicks off at school it is not because they are being bullied, but because their parents expose them to domestic violence. 'Phones off at school' makes all the phone-related problems the parents' fault. Forgetting, of course, that the phone is just a device that connects children to their school peers.
https://www.iamexpat.nl/education/education-news/netherlands...
If I had a phone with calendar and a to do list, when at school, I might have fared better.
Enforcement will likely come down to don't do stupid shit with your phone or risk losing it. Ignoring class for a phone is stupid shit regardless of what's on the screen.
IMO the issue is with the school, not us. Schools will inadvertently introduce pad as a learning device, and his friends will use such devices too. I hope they ban it in Canadian schools too.
Kids are missing out on the fun stuff and replacing it with phones. i hope we start to see change.
The speaker suggested that the question’at what age do you give your child access to the internet’ could better be framed ‘at what age do you want to give internet companies access to your child’
Social media is designed to be addictive. Much of the internet is not. I'm increasingly in favor of banning Facebook and Instagram to under 18s.
Australia has also banned smart phones from schools. Here the ban had nothing do to with access to the internet or the effects of social media.
To paraphrase your question: at what age does constantly accessing the internet not interfere with work or schooling?
The answer is never, of course. All workplaces have policies limiting it. Schools have the same problem: there were always kids using phones hidden under desks to send message to each other. Workplaces enforcing their internet policies using monitoring software is rare thankfully, but expecting kids to exercise the same self discipline as a adult can is futile and so they moved to a ban. They ran studies on the outcome: https://theconversation.com/banning-mobile-phones-in-schools... TL;DR: Banning phones improved scholastic results.
I'd lay long odds the article is little more than click bait. My guess is a very well known result and the schools are actually banning phones so they can do their main job, which is teach kids. But rather than report that, the journo speculated in the most inflammatory way possible.
Why can't a school decide on their own?
All the ressources mentionned can probably be accessed through other means, usually the school library which has computer terminals.
that said, they shouldn’t be allowed in actual class
Both my teens text me throughout the school day if they need something. It's not every day, but it's several times a week. It's incredibly useful. I'd fight this vigorously if they tried this in my school district.
If the school wants to teach children how to use these tools, fine, but on devices that won't spy on them or allow them to destroy their brain on tiktok. They can do this at home.
For example the barrister friend in question's daughter had her phone confiscated and it went missing in custody of the staff. The school disclaimed all responsibility but paid the moneyclaim out for a new phone quietly when the relevant stick was wielded and removed their policy of confiscation immediately as they worked out it was a liability. Turns out that while the law says they can do this, it doesn't mention anything about having no duty of care of other people's property at the same time...
You could probably see where this goes next - very quickly all my cards were stolen by my classmates, and I could do nothing while I saw my classmates play my own cards, as I had no proof they were mine.
That certainly taught me a lesson or two about human nature, at least at that time...
it sounds like because they have access to a school laptop, you're assuming the consequences of smartphone usage will still apply. what are the odds that the impact is actually identical? it's almost certainly not. and if i had to put money on it, i would say the impact is significantly reduced.
still there, sure, but this is a spectrum
A century ago in the US, a lot of support for Prohibition came from the impact of liquor, yet Prohibition itself also banned beer.
I can very easily believe that the backlash against dark patterns, against deliberately addictive apps (games and social media), against advertising getting squeezed into what would otherwise be normal conversations, against the surveillance that currently manifests as GDPR cookie popups because almost everyone both corporate and government would rather annoy people than stop snooping, may well lead to a new Prohibition on all such things.
But will this new Prohibition throw out the baby with the bathwater? Smartphones do a lot of genuinely useful things.
This is about a developing child’s mind and the precautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that social media is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to adolescent girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.
There's a reason why we don't let 8-year-olds drive, and its not just that nobody bothered to take the time to teach them.
And no, no matter how many times I tell my three-year-old the stove is hot, I'm not going to put them in charge of cooking dinner on the stove. Instead, I'll ban them from using the stove outside of extremely supervised limited circumstances. I'm also not going to put them in charge of chopping things with sharp knives either. Instead I'll find other more age-appropriate ways for them to participate in making the meal.
Same for fire hazard in buildings or strict hygiene rules in hospital to avoid infections.
And thousands of laws that make people behave in general. Like prohibiting murder.
I found Duolingo was very engaging. I also found it wildly ineffective at actually teaching me more than the absolute basics of any languages… except Arabic where it didn't even manage that.
Oh, I would also like to earn a little bit more, at least the same as a junior or mid-level developer! I have MSc students earning as much as me, with 1/10 of my experience (that's why I'm teaching them). I like to teach, but damn, I would like to be equally compensated! :)
It's a two-way street..
Even the best teachers won't be engaging to some of their students.
Moreover, this system we have is at the detriment of boys' education. Many of those who misbehave or underperform because they don't want to sit at a desk all day are loaded up with ADHD drugs because it's a system that doesn't work for them. I don't have a link but government stats show clear underperformance among boys.
Meanwhile the Western countries are wondering why they are being eclipsed in academic performance.
Don't we all say that though?!? :) It's hard to measure the value if we can never try out the alternative and see where it would lead us.
Although, regardless of how engaging is the material, students will never know if they are already doom scrolling their phone even before the start of the class.
Sure, smartphones can be very distracting, more so than dumbphones, but there have been rules in place for phones in a classroom since the 2000s and kids would still sneak them in, this won't change kids sneaking in anything, nor does it change the fact that you weren't supposed to be on the phone in class in the first place (or that teachers can't police it or try to).
The main issue is underpaid, overworked, and more often than not, teachers who aren't properly qualified to teach (not for lack of an official paper saying they can), who can't reach troubled/lacking students, and quite frankly they don't care to or even attempt to.
Earlier today someone posted this article [1], I'd love to know out of those 72% who participated on the survey, how many are teachers that students can say: "Mrs. X is one of the best teachers I've ever had. She always makes the lessons interesting and goes out of her way to help us understand the material.", "Mr. X really cares about his students. He takes the time to get to know us and makes learning fun."
I'm sure a lot of you from the newer generations have experienced that moment where you turned to the internet to learn something from Youtube because the teacher in class couldn't be bothered to, or simply was inept at explaining it in a way that YOU could understand, but some random Indian guy on Youtube can. Not to say that the older generations didn't have similar experiences.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/12/72-percen...
PS: This isn't me saying that we should or shouldn't ban phone, (phones have been banned from classrooms since the start anyway), this is me saying that we have much bigger problems that are overshadowed by scapegoats which no one bothers to bring up.
Why is no one talking about the fact that so many school's infrastructure is so bad that it can potentially even be a risk to your child's health, physical and mental, I.E: extremely hot or cold classrooms, poor ventilation, the bathrooms being unsanitary, etc...
Why are kids 180cm+ sitting down on wooden chairs meant for kids with 40cm less?
Why are kids forced to carry 10kg+ worth of books on their back every morning, (which cost a fortune btw).
Why does no one talk about the food that's served to kids being terrible, not just unhealthy, but just horrible because they will hire the cheapest contract and purchase the cheapest ingredients, and often times quite unsanitary looking (if those kitchen's I grew up seeing were restaurants, I wouldn't eat there.)
What about staff who won't give a flying * about your 14 year old child smoking behind the school's building, or getting bullied right there in-front of everyone and the excuse is that they aren't paid well enough to care.
You can keep listing problems that honestly rank higher and contribute to your child's poor education more.
Sorry for the rant.
<< The main issue is underpaid, overworked, and more often than not, teachers who aren't properly qualified to teach (not for lack of an official paper saying they can), who can't reach troubled/lacking students, and quite frankly they don't care to or even attempt to.
It is easy to paint with broad strokes. For example, in Chicagoland, teachers can be paid fairly well for the amount of work they do ( though based on some of the stories, I would not want to go through that myself; surely, some just check out ).
According to this article, he's not. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coddling-of-the-american-p...
Any usefulness needs to be balanced with the possible detrimentals consequences.
They really like games like Tetris, Pokemon and Zelda.
It's fantastic.
I'm not even sure the detail — will it look like a Butlerian Jihad on all tech because AI is everywhere and enough people hate that, or "just" a ban on all social media (including this website) — but the vibes have been brewing for a while now, and it could well take the shape of smartphones being wound back to 8310s.
> As far as I'm aware, liquor and beer are also banned from schools and presumably always have been, before, during, and after Prohibition.
So it's fine for the analogy that phones might get banned from schools before some kind of larger social rejection on par with the example I gave, yes?
I was actually never loaded with ADHD drugs even though I turned out to have needed them. Nuts that it's given to people who might not need it, while people who do need it are overlooked.
I learned never to take anything of value into school.
My kids learned the same thing in the same way.
I'm also not saying that teachers could ask nicely and then do nothing if the rule is broken. Actually, one could ask students to either put their phones in their bag or in a "safe phone-box", and still seize the phone if it's used.
Bringing awarness is important, when it comes to fighting addiction.
> I'm also not saying that teachers could ask nicely and then do nothing if the rule is broken.
But what rule? Clearly not some rule banning them, since your argument is there shouldn't be a rule banning their use. If the rule isn't a ban, then what cause does the teacher have to forcibly remove the phone? Is the student allowed to have the phone or not? It would seem like the idea a teacher is able to make the judgement call of policing the phone usage in the classroom and deciding when it becomes a distraction isn't working. And having it hidden behind a vague "causing a distraction" often can't easily be proven other than the teacher's judgement.
The teacher shouldn't have to deal with supporting their decisions of removing the phone they should be focused on teaching the lesson. Having a clear-cut rule that phones are not to be out in the classroom makes it obvious where the line is. If it is just at the teacher's discretion of what is a distraction, students (who are children and already often have a hard time with decision making abilities) would probably have a harder time understanding the edges of the judgement decision.
Sure seems like the simpler solution is to just have a blanket "phones aren't allowed" rule instead of the mess it is currently. No judgement call, no forcing the teacher to defend their position, the standards are clear from the start. Back when I was in school, about the time the iPhone came out, cellphones were common for highschoolers (age 13-18) but having them out in a classroom was strictly banned. If a teacher caught any student using a phone without previously having the teacher's permission, it would immediately be taken up and brought to the office and only released at the end of school. This seems entirely in-line with the program being implemented here.
> The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.
I wish I had kids, but sadly not yet.
Myself, I grew up with a Commodore 64, whose user manual didn't only teach me to code, but was even part of me learning to read.
But everyone is different, what worked fine for me isn't necessarily even a good idea for others.
> This is about a developing child’s mind and the cautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that it is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.
Sounds like you agree with me that much of the current stuff is bad. I'm saying that some of the rest is both harmless and helpful.
And while the genie is out of the bottle, I want to minimize the exposure of social media. The smartphone experience is shrouded in social media. I want to do everything in my power to put her in an environment with other parents who have agreed to modify their environment. We’re looking at San Francisco Waldorf School. They even have a “computer lab” with designated screen time in the later grades.
There's a reason I was comparing social media to hard liquor (and, if you read between the lines, gambling) — we are basically agreed on the harms side of the equation :)
Something like a c64 would be even better.
So the correct answer is to tell your kids to tell them to get fucked and call you. At that point, remind them that the device is your property, decline their request and they can only threaten you, which is 100% illegal.
I am more worried about the teachers from experience than the other students. Some of them I have encountered over the last 15 years of having three kids at school have been right nasty pieces of work and should not be in a position to have power over a minor.
Teachers have many of the same powers over children that their parents do. Power to detain, to punish, and yes to search.
If you're not happy with that as a parent then you can home educate them instead.
Also, your argument is pretty much "if you don't like it just leave". Which is one of the worst arguments for pretty much anything.
im telling you, the police will not like that policy any more than the students.
you're in a school. you don't have the right to do whatever you please.
With that said, I've got no idea what schools should do about things like sexting.
If I was a teacher and I confiscated a phone which might have illegal photos of underage students on it, I wouldn't want to turn a blind eye to that. But I also sure as hell wouldn't want to search it myself. I'd want that done by someone of unimpeachable character.
Source: parent of high schooler.
I get kids may still spend a lot of time talking to people in there but how different is that from when my sister spent all her free time talking to friends on the phone as a teenager…
There is an easy solution that could be implemented. Kids can go to the office during lunch or a break and request their phone. They can send their message and then give back their phone.
None of this seems very likely...
If you look at nonfamily child abductions, most of them involve kids between 0 and 5. Also in a significant proportion of abduction, the kid is not even targeted as it involve parents leaving the kid in a car and the car is stolen.
It's not a difficult problem to solve, but I guarantee there would be some parents fighting against it if implemented. Dealing with parents these days can sometimes be more difficult than their kids.
I'm not generally all that negative to social media as long as they know how to deal with it, and Discord is probably towards the better end, especially if your kid has some self-discipline about which servers they join, but it can be nearly as bad.
Put another way: If your kid hangs out with the "good" kids, it's probably fine, ranging to good. E.g. my son started spontaneously cleaning his room today because one of his friends had ribbed him about needing it. But if your kid hangs out with the "bad" kids, Discord provides an easy way for them to do that without it being obviously visible to you, so it needs you to keep an eye out.
I think the fact that it's so easy for it to fly under the radar is the biggest problem.
Quite a different set of parameters than abductors targetting random kids in a gas station and driving away with the car.
You have a literal internet connected computer with any function you could care to name, interactive touch screen display, full sound with headphones being provided by the student.
The situation we have now is that there are few apps that are suitable for a classrooms, even fewer which teachers would be allowed to use and none which are endorsed or included in the curriculum[1].
Meanwhile students phones have no central management unless by parents using a specialist app, are not automatically locked down to appropriate use during school hours, meaning they just get used for messaging and inappropriate stuff.
There is no reason that a students phone couldn't become the world's most amazing educational tool the moment they walk onto school premises - the world just hasn't caught up yet and probably won't for a while.
[1] I don't know this, but I'm sure they're providing iPads or something if they're actually doing anything around this.
> There is no reason that a students phone couldn't become the world's most amazing educational too
Or, some new, advanced technology exists, therefore, because it is new and advanced, it needs to be applied. This is an affliction.
GP asked what use a smartphone would have, implying that it could only ever be bad. I'm just arguing that this isn't necessarily the case, not that we should adopt it or even that adoption is likely.
There are enough stories about children dying because schools locked away medication. I have very little trust that schools will apply any common sense.
Yeah, schools have a history of issues. However, this policy isn't really new. It was in place when I went to school and there were no issues.
Keyword "should".
> The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.
Yep, the "easy" and extremely irresponsible solution.
> It was in place when I went to school and there were no issues.
Good for you, but
https://www.9news.com.au/health/boy-dies-after-school-confis...
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/20/califor...
Also, study hall is an elective class. You still need to behave in study hall. The purpose is to study. Lunch could be an exception, but not really. There should be enough time to eat and socialize just a little. The lunch periods are not excessively long.
Chromebook’s still aren’t nearly as integrated into schools as you might expect.
Most study hall / libraries have a number of computer terminals.
(Study haul? I don't know this term.)
Leave it to the parents not the schools!
Whatever you call a disruption in normal education such as when a teacher gets in a car accident on the way to work and suddenly there’s a non educational period for kids.
Supply teacher. No idea how the details were worked out, but there was always a substitute if the usual was unavailable for whatever reason.
But the GCSEs were September 1998 to June 2000, and the UK government loves to fiddle with education, so I wouldn't be shocked if you told me that had changed.
Given more notice, the school phones supply teachers (or an agency for them). Some of these teachers will expect to be ready to get to a school with very little notice.
In the worst case, where the cover teacher has not had chance to discuss what lesson is needed, they're going to say "let's go through the last chapter in the textbook" rather than "I give up, fiddle on your phones".