4 Things Primary School Leaders Can do to Help Safeguard Childhood for their Students

Schools are in a powerful position to help safeguard childhood and to let kids be kids for longer. To turn things around, we need to call on the whole village and schools are increasingly acknowledging that they can make a significant impact in shifting the norm around personal smartphone ownership in their communities.

At Wait Mate, we've identified four things that primary school leaders can do right now to help preserve childhood and work towards the goal of primary schools being smartphone-free for all Aussie kids.

1. Share the Wait Mate movement in official school channels and encourage parents to join the movement. By supporting and encouraging parents to commit to wait, school leaders are sending a clear message that they want to support parents in delaying smartphones.
2. Host a parent talk on the topic of digital wellbeing, the research and reasons to delay smartphones. There are many experts who can support these events, for example psychologists, online safety experts and organisations such as Screen Sanity Australia. Many schools have a resident psychologist that they like to use for this purpose. A Wait Mate representative can support these events or a School Organiser can request resources from the Wait Mate team of volunteers to do so instead.
3. Update the school smartphone policy - many primary schools are boldly declaring themselves "smartphone free". Regardless of whether schools take this position, they have an important role to play in ensuring phones are not present during the school day so that students can learn and socialise without distraction, and be kept safe (without getting around school guardrails and safety nets when it comes to online content by hot spotting). Some studies suggest that the mere presence of a smartphone can impair memory performance and information retrieval. We believe every child deserves the opportunity to learn and grow without the constant pull of an addictive device in their pocket, locker or bag.
4. Parents are increasingly interested in the tech culture of a school as part of their selection process. Schools can support parents in acknowledging the significance of this aspect of school life by prioritising information the school smartphone and tech culture at key moments such as enrolment, orientation and open days.

We urge parents to share this article with schools leaders or visit our School Organiser Kit resources to get the conversation started.