Sweden is to implement a nationwide mobile phone ban in all schools in an attempt to improve security and study conditions for students.
From the next school year, starting in autumn 2026, it will be compulsory for all schools and after-school clubs to collect students’ phones and hold them until the end of the day.
The new rule, which will affect children between the ages of seven and 16, is part of a package of proposed measures announced by the government on Tuesday.
As well as the phone ban, proposed changes will cover the curriculum, the grading system and teacher training.
“What we are presenting today is a historic budget investment in schools and the biggest reform agenda in over 30 years,” said Sweden’s new education and schools minister, Simona Mohamsson.
Simona Mohamsson, Sweden’s minister for education and integration, said the government was making a ‘historic budget investment in schools’. Photograph: Josefine Stenersen/The Guardian
The budget bill, which the government will submit next week, allocates 95m kronor (£7.52m) for 2026 and 100m kronor the following year to implement the phone ban.
Most schools in Sweden already confiscate mobile phones at the start of the school day, but students have found ways to get around the ban such as handing in a fake phone or saying that they have forgotten their phone or that it is broken.
“This should apply to everyone in all of Sweden’s classrooms. It applies to every young person in Sweden and is not optional,” Mohamsson, who is leader of the Liberals party, has previously said of the ban.
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Earlier this year, Denmark said it would ban mobile phones in schools and after-school clubs on the recommendation of a government commission that also found children under 13 should not have their own smartphone or tablet.
Norway last year announced a strict minimum age of 15 on social media use as the government accused tech companies of being “pitted against small children’s brains”.
Recent research in the Netherlands, which in January 2024 issued national guidelines recommending a ban on smartphones in classrooms, with which almost all Dutch schools have complied, has found improvements to the learning environment. The vast majority (75%) of secondary schools surveyed said that children found it easier to concentrate and 28% said results had improved.
France, meanwhile, tightened its ban on mobile phones in middle schools in September.
