Phone free and happier

It’s mid-morning on Thursday and the corridors of St Joseph’s Secondary School in Castlebar teem with students moving between classes. Some girls have books, some girls have bags, every girl carries a dark-grey pouch that carries her mobile phone.
The Yondr Pouches are special cases that lock once the phone is placed inside them and can be unlocked by touching the pouch against bases (magnets) placed beside every exit.
It’s different, it’s intriguing and soon a group of girls from all years sit with The Mayo News and explain what the pouches are all about.
“When we arrive at school we lock our phones into the pouches. We carry the pouches with us for the rest of the day and leave them in front of us on the desk in every class, so the teacher knows the phones are locked away. Then, when we’re going home in the evening we touch our pouches against one of the bases on the way out and they’re unlocked,” a third year student explained.

Good move
“When I heard what was being planned, I thought it would be terrible,” a senior girl replied when asked about her initial thoughts. “Other years, it was against the rules to use your phone in school, but we knew we could probably sneak a quick look at it if the teacher wasn’t looking,” she added, before being asked if her feelings had changed in recent weeks.
“Yeah, I thought having no access to the phone during school would be awful but to be honest it’s good. Having the phone locked away removes the pressure of wondering if there’s something I need to see on it, or if it buzzed in my pocket I’d be on edge until I got to look at it, now I don’t have access to it and that anxiety is gone,” she explained.
Questions such as accessibility to parental contact and the use of phones for access to money at lunchtime were also discussed.
“If parents need to contact us, we need to contact them, or there’s some emergency then we just go through the office here in the school,” a junior student explained.
Lunchtime access is a privilege. “It only applies to senior students who are allowed down town at lunchtime,” one of the Leaving Certs said. “A lot of us have our cash cards on the phone, so we’re allowed unlock our pouches as we head out at lunchtime and then we lock the phones back into the pouch again when we come back.”

Less distracted
Nearby, Peadar Ó Tuathail, the school principal, was buoyant about the new project. 
“A huge amount of work went into this with all the stakeholders including students, parents, board of management and many others,” he told The Mayo News. “We introduced this when the girls came back at the start of the school year, and it has been a great success already. It’s really important that nothing interferes with the educational mission of our school – the top performing girls’ school in Connacht.
“Students are less distracted in a phone-free environment. It also benefits teachers because they can be teachers rather than phone police.
“The idea is to simply disconnect from the virtual and connect with the actual while the students are here in St Joseph’s. Our main focus is always the wellbeing of our girls, and the impact of phones on teenage mental health cannot be ignored. Yondr gives students the opportunity to experience coming to school without the added pressure of having to conform to looking or acting a certain way for fear it will be captured on camera and shared.”
The Yondr Pouch system is in operation in a limited number of schools nationwide and most have the unlocking bases situated on the exterior walls of the school so they can only be accessed outside when students are going home. However, St Joseph’s operate on a high-trust model with the bases located on interior walls near exits, making them easier to access – but the principal has no worries about phones being unlocked during the school day.
“We work together on this. We trust our students and they have repaid that trust brilliantly. They see the benefits, we see the benefits and their parents see the benefits. As well as the wall-mounted bases, we also have mobile units for use in the school and when teachers have girls out at games or events where they need their phones,” he explained.

Balancing wellbeing
Mr Ó Tuathail and all at St Joseph’s are working with Dr Giampiero Tarantino from the Department of Sociology in Trinity College on this project. Dr Tarantino has for some time been conducting a study exploring adolescents’ online engagement and experience in Ireland and beyond.
The preliminary results will be available in the coming weeks but research so far shows high levels of screen time (three-plus hours) per day is associated with significant declines in child and adolescent wellbeing. 
A study conducted by behavioural scientists Yehuda Wacks and Aviv Weinstein in 2021 found that excessive smartphone use was associated with reduced sleep time and sleep quality, problems with sleep onset, insufficient sleep and insomnia. They also found excessive screentime associated with depression, anxiety, social anxiety, low self-esteem and low mental wellbeing. 
The study conducted by Wacks and Weinstein also stated Gray Matter Volume in the brain was shown in problematic smartphone users. Therefore, any reduction in phone use would be beneficial.
In St Joseph’s the Yondr Pouches have made a big impact, and Mr Ó Tuathail is certainly a fan.
“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen – they are to be lived,” he smiled.