From an Guardian article in Oct 2025, roughly 5 years into the first statewide phone ban in Australia:

One year after the ban was implemented, a survey of almost 1,000 public school principals led by the NSW Department of Education’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation found that 95% of principals still supported the ban. Eighty-one per cent said the ban has improved students’ learning, 86% said it has improved socialisation among students and 87% believed students were less distracted in the classroom.

Research from South Australia – released in March this year – revealed 70% of teachers reported increased focus and engagement during learning time and 64% of teachers reported “a lower frequency of critical incidents” at school as a result of device use.

Ruqayah, who graduated from a western Sydney high school in 2024, thinks the bans were an “overreaction”. After going through high school with access to phones, she finished her final year with the phone ban in place and says fellow students were still finding ways to use them in secret. “Teenagers find their phones very important,” she says. “It makes them feel secure and safe, so taking away something that is important to them just causes more stress and more worry which makes situations worse at school and harder for teachers, supervisors [and] support workers to deal with.”

Prof Neil Selwyn from the School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University. “Some politicians were promising improvements in student learning and mental health. But one of the main drivers of these bans was undoubtedly that they were popular.”

Selwyn says phone bans in Australia were not set up “with the intention of properly testing their effectiveness” and says concrete research in this area is “inconclusive, and … not particularly rigorous”.

He also believes the latest government data from NSW and South Australia is “not particularly insightful”.

“The key question is how these bans play out over time,” he says. “Claiming that these bans are suddenly leading to dramatic improvements makes for a neat political soundbite, but we need a lot more in-depth and sustained investigation of what effects these bans are actually having.