This school year, to encourage student active engagement, participation and academic success in the classroom, and in line with school policy, procedures and best practice, we are making some important changes to our mobile phone procedure.
Please read the reasons, guidelines and procedure of how this will work so that you can support your child in following this. We know that our students do best when our big messages, rules and policies are supported and reinforced by you at home.
We understand that mobile phones and technology are now a key part of modern life. Most students own a mobile phone with access to the internet and for safety reasons students will carry a mobile phone to contact home after or before school. However, mobile phones can and often do lead to several problems in school such as bullying, filming, distraction and disruption to lessons and inappropriate usage of the internet and social media leading to potential safeguarding issues.
Here at Warwick, we strongly encourage our students to develop socially and emotionally. This development is just as important as any academic progress or examination grades. Improving social skills and emotional development can best be done by talking to each other, interacting, and developing real connections at break and lunchtime, as opposed to using their mobile phones. For these reasons, our new procedure is to completely ban the use of mobile phones in the high school, during school hours. This will continue to be the procedure for middle school as well. This includes break and lunchtimes.
Any student found using their mobile phone during school hours will be dealt with in accordance with our policy and procedure outlined in brief below. Copies of the policy can be found on the school website.
Guidelines and Procedure
1. Mobile phones must be turned in 1st hour and will be locked in an office during school hours. This includes break and lunchtimes. Phones must not be seen or heard in the high school, we are a no phones school. Phones will be returned to students at 3:15 each day.
2. Any student seen using their mobile phone during school hours, including break and lunchtimes, will have their phone confiscated, student write up, parent contact, and parent retrieval of the phone.
We appreciate that there are sometimes life events or situations where a student may feel they need contact with home during the day. We ask parents and caregivers to inform us of this as soon as possible and students will be allowed to use the school phone to call home as necessary. The new procedure will go into effect on Tuesday, August 29, 2023 – the first day of school.