Dear Parents and Carers
Over recent years we have gained quite a lot of experience at crisis management here at Myton; cyber attack, RAAC, travellers etc. However, crisis management is remarkably simple when it comes down to it – the key people gather around the table and I ask “can we keep the students safe?” And until the answer to this is yes, we go no further. We must do whatever we need to do to keep students safe, and until then, we don’t even consider to what extent we can teach them anything. In the case of RAAC we had to educate year groups at home and change all internal timetables and rooms to keep our students safe – caused massive upheaval for everybody but that’s what it took.
Some crises are less obvious and creep up on us and that is what has happened with children’s use of smartphones. I would describe the amount of harmful behaviour we see through smartphone use as a crisis; it is causing harm to children, affecting learning, causing behaviour issues including bullying, facilitating sexualised behaviour, leading to addictions including gaming and porn, draining this school and others of resources dealing with the consequences and it is changing the definition of childhood. I’m not alone in describing this as a crisis – numerous charities, police chiefs and most organisations working with kids do the same. Even the Tories are now campaigning for smartphone bans in school (remarkably more vocal on the subject now they’re in opposition, complete lack of backbone on it when they were in power – lets see if Labour have any more nerve).
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