Sweden set to ban mobile phones in schools, joining trend of shelving screens for students

MALMÖ, Sweden, June 9, (AP): Long championed as a leader in adopting digital technology, Sweden is set to ban mobile phones in schools beginning in the fall for the next academic year as part of a broad, international reversal on the use of screens in classrooms. Since 2023, the Scandinavian country’s center-right coalition government has pursued a policy prioritizing more reading time and less screen time, particularly among preschool students, by favoring books and other traditional learning tools.

Lawmaker Joar Forsell, chairperson of the Swedish parliament's education committee, said officials have seen a decline in the general ability to read and write in Sweden, especially among younger students. "We’re rolling the screens back because we believe that books and more traditional ways of learning are better for kids,” Forsell said.

Sweden’s plans are part of a broader shift and a digital reckoning against smartphones in schools internationally after countries outfitted their campuses with laptops, tablets and learning apps for their students. Classrooms have become saturated with screens and a growing number of parents, teachers and school districts say it is time to scale back. In the Nordics, Denmark looks set to implement a similar ban to Sweden, and a law restricting use of mobile devices in schools in Finland came into effect last August.

Other countries from Spain to South Korea have taken a variety of steps that range from a ban of mobile phones in classrooms to limits on screen-based homework. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the US, has said it will ban screens until second grade, require daily caps for screen time per grade, ban YouTube and require an audit of all education technology contracts.

Tech-savvy Sweden, which is home to music streamer Spotify and telecoms giant Ericsson, has one of the most digitally advanced education systems in the world. But the mobile ban aims to foster learning environments with fewer distractions by building on restrictions on phones already independently implemented by many schools in the nation of over 10 million.

Alongside the ban, the government this year set aside 555 million Swedish krona ($59 million) as part of a new grant for purchasing textbooks and teachers’ guides. The back-to-books policy was triggered by falling reading levels. In the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment, the latest study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 24.3% of Swedish ninth graders did not reach a basic level of reading comprehension.

That figure is only slightly better than the European Union average of 26.2%. Magnus Haake, an associate professor of cognitive science at Lund University in southern Sweden, said learning with physical materials engages the motor sensory part of kids’ brains and "boosts the whole system.”