All regional governments have confirmed that next year the schools in their territories will be subject to restrictive regulation on the use of mobile phones in their centers, with a common regulatory framework, except for the Basque Country, which will leave freedom of choice to each school. The regulation goes in the direction that Catalonia adopted on Tuesday: prohibition in primary school and shutdown throughout the school day in secondary and post-secondary.
This was the proposal that Minister Pilar Alegría proposed, based on the recommendation of the State School Council, and that she put on the table yesterday with the autonomous communities. A meeting, which “took place in a good climate”, attended only by the councilors of Catalonia, Asturias and Navarra, and which served “to verify the common interest of the educational community in providing a response to this concern”, according to a statement from the ministry. The executives governed by the PP sent their vice-counselors or secretaries. They considered the meeting useless because it is a regional competition, which many communities had already exercised, such as Madrid, which banned cell phones in the 2020-2021 academic year. The councilors want the minister to call a Sectoral Conference and not a work meeting.
In any case, the Basque Government was the only executive that did not send any representative to the meeting called by Education, a position that obeys the decision of Iñigo Urkullu’s Cabinet to follow “its own roadmap.” The Department of Education, led by Jokin Bildarratz, already communicated two weeks ago that they are not betting on prohibiting the use of mobile phones in educational centers in general, but rather they propose leaving the development of specific regulations in the hands of each center.
Specifically, the Basque administration will offer schools training regarding this problem so that, before the end of the year, they have developed regulations in this regard, which must be “agreed upon and addressed by the school council.” “Prohibiting is a word that we do not like to use in Education,” said the Deputy Minister of Education, Begoña Pedrosa.
Andalusia, the Canary Islands, Castilla-La Mancha, Asturias, Galicia, Murcia, Madrid, Castilla y León, Aragón, Ceuta and Melilla, in addition to Catalonia, have their own regulations, some approved after the Government put the initiative on the table on last December 13th.
There remain the Balearic Islands, La Rioja, the Valencian Community, Extremadura and Navarra that have already expressed their intention to regulate it. For its part, Cantabria ordered educational centers in September to undertake the debate to regulate mobile phones. Following the ministry’s proposal, counselor Sergio Silva had expressed his intention to join the common position and establish a regulatory framework so that the schools in his community could limit it. Cantabria is redefining its digital plan in schools and plans to remove screens and projectors in classrooms for children under 8 years old.
