The New Zealand government will ban mobile phones in schools because of a worrying decline in literacy, Conservative Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said.
New Zealand schools used to have some of the world’s best literacy scores, but reading and writing levels have fallen to such an extent that some researchers fear there is an education crisis.
Luxon will thereby adopt a policy that has been tested with mixed results in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. The move would stop classroom distractions and help students focus, Luxon said.
“We will ban phones in schools. We want our children to learn and our teachers to teach,” he said.
Researchers from the New Zealand charity Education Hub warned last year of a “literacy crisis”, finding that more than one-third of 15-year-olds could barely read or write.
Luxon’s conservative government, which was sworn in on Monday, has already been mired in controversy in its first week in office.
First, she unexpectedly scrapped the world’s leading smoking control measures, which were supposed to ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 2008, in what doctors called “tragic,” and then agreed to restart offshore oil and gas exploration, ditching one of the country’s most important climate policies. the changes of former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
