Turning Crime into Opportunity: Community Partnerships and the School Mobile Phone Challenge

When community partnerships work, they can be transformative. A vivid example emerged this week when secondary schools in the Thames Valley were invited to apply for a share of £250,000 – money seized from criminals and redirected into classrooms to help implement the new mobile phone ban in schools. It is the kind of creative, cross-sector thinking that too rarely reaches the level it deserves.

Listening to Thames Valley Police & Crime Commissioner Matthew Barber on Radio 4, it was heartening to hear him frame this as a deliberate act of community partnership. TVP is committed to using the proceeds of crime to help schools navigate this significant, and unfunded, government policy change.

The funding context: a system under strain

This matters because of the severity of the financial pressure schools are operating under. The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ latest Annual Report on Education Spending in England makes sobering reading for anyone in educational leadership. Secondary school spending per pupil stands at £7,800 – a real-terms fall of 3% since 2010, even before accounting for the specific cost pressures schools face.

The School Cuts coalition, backed by all the major teaching unions, is even more blunt: in 2024/25, 74% of schools in England had less funding in real terms than in 2010: 14,112 schools that cannot afford the same staffing and resources as they could fifteen years ago.

The practical consequence of these real terms cuts on schools is stark: research shows that 94% of secondary schools will not be able to afford their costs next year. As Pepe Di’Iasio, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has argued: “We cannot keep putting schools and colleges in a position where they are left with no choice but to make further cuts to provision.”

It is against this backdrop that headteachers must today implement the January 2026 mobile phone guidance. The updated DfE guidance states that “all schools should be mobile phone-free environments by default; anything other than this should be by exception only,” extending expectations to cover not just lessons but also time between lessons, break times and lunchtime.

The implementation dilemma

In a well-resourced system, the implementation challenge would be manageable. However, in the current climate, it presents a genuine dilemma for school leaders and governors. Schools face a spectrum of possible approaches:

The most budget-friendly is the so-called “not seen, not heard” policy: phones remain in bags and are simply not used. This costs nothing, but enforcement is largely dependent on goodwill and vigilance, and it places a significant burden on classroom teachers who must police compliance alongside teaching. Ofsted has been clear that where schools allow exceptions to the phone-free policy, inspectors will want to understand the reasoning and will check for consistency in approach, and where phones are found to contribute to behavioural issues or to negatively affect pupils’ ability to focus, this will feature in inspection judgements.

More robust solutions: storage lockers, or lockable pouches, come at considerable cost, particularly for larger secondary schools. These approaches effectively remove the phone from the student’s possession completely, reducing enforcement burden on staff, but requiring significant upfront capital investment, which schools may find hard to come by.

This is exactly where PCC Barber’s programme demonstrates its value. By redirecting proceeds of crime funding towards lockable storage solutions, Thames Valley schools can move beyond the “not seen, not heard” compromise and implement something more robust: freeing teachers to teach and freeing leaders to focus on the things that most directly affect children’s learning.

Impact on suspensions and exclusions: an underexplored dimension

As an Independent Appeal Panel member for Central Bedfordshire, my initial concern was the ripple effect that such a policy change would have on suspensions and exclusions; an angle that has received insufficient attention in the public debate around the mobile phone ban.

Exclusions and suspensions most commonly arise from persistent disruptive behaviour and refusal to follow school rules. Introducing a new, high-visibility rule; particularly one that adolescents may actively resist, creates new friction points. If a student refuses to hand over their phone, or is caught using it in breach of policy, schools must decide how to respond. Where behaviour management systems are already under pressure, this adds a further layer of complexity.

The DfE’s own data on suspensions and permanent exclusions for the autumn term 2024–25, published in late 2025, provides a baseline against which the impact of firmer phone enforcement should be tracked. Senior leaders, governors and local authority officers with responsibility for exclusions should be monitoring whether phone-related incidents are appearing more frequently in behaviour logs, and whether the demographic profile of those incidents maps onto existing patterns of disadvantage.

The stakes here are significant. Nathan Shillingford, who runs The Invested Man project in the West Midlands, describes his work as disrupting “the school-to-prison pipeline by providing immersive workshops to young males aged between 12 and 16 at risk of exclusion or already excluded from education.” Every unnecessary exclusion carries long-term consequences for the child, for public services, and for communities. If the mobile phone policy is implemented without sufficient nuance in behaviour management, it risks becoming a new mechanism for disproportionate sanction.

The wider case for PCC–school partnerships

Thames Valley is not alone in recognising the potential of Proceeds of Crime Act funding to support communities. In Lancashire, Police and Crime Commissioner Clive Grunshaw has invested £60,000 of seized criminal cash to expand the Pol-Ed education programme, which has been adopted by 77% of the county’s schools and colleges, delivering sessions to over 111,000 students. In the West Midlands, PCC Simon Foster has described the reinvestment of proceeds of crime as ensuring “that crime does not pay – there is a real sense of justice in taking money out of the pockets of criminals and putting it back into the hands of the people who are working tirelessly to improve their neighbourhoods.”

These examples represent a model of cross-sector collaboration that education leadership theorists have long argued is essential for sustainable school improvement. David Hargreaves’ influential work on social capital in schools argues that school improvement depends on the richness of the institutional relationships schools can draw upon. His 2010 thought-piece for the National College, Creating a Self-Improving School System, argued that inter-school partnerships and alliances represent the new organisational form on which a self-improving system has to be based. The PCC partnership model extends this logic outward, beyond the school system, into the institutions of local governance.

With my Sociologist hat on, I find Hargreaves and Fullan’s concept of professional capital as relevant to this discussion. Their argument, developed in Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School (2012), is that human capital (individual teacher quality), social capital (the quality of relationships and collaborative practice), and decisional capital (professional judgement) must all be developed together. What the Thames Valley initiative models is a form of civic social capital: the connections between public institutions that enable resources to flow toward children’s needs. Creating connections with external stakeholders enhances members’ decisional and professional capital.

A call for local leadership: the case for Central Bedfordshire

My own local authority, Central Bedfordshire, would make a compelling case for similar action. The educational outcomes data is concerning. The Attainment 8 score for Central Bedfordshire stands at 42.3, against a national average of 46.1, which is the widest it has been for three years. Local performance data shows attainment remains below national averages particularly at Key Stages Two and Four, and the disadvantage gap is wider than comparable areas. The Council’s own Health and Wellbeing Strategy for 2024–29 identifies gaps in educational attainment between most and least deprived populations as one of its central challenges.

In this context, I would urge the PCC for Central Bedfordshire to consider whether a similar programme to Thames Valley’s could be developed locally; directing proceeds of crime funding to help Middle and Upper schools implement the mobile phone policy in a way that does not deplete the limited budgets that should be focused on teaching, intervention and support for the most vulnerable pupils.

This is, at its heart, a call for joined-up local governance. The evidence base for the phone ban’s benefits is strongest for low-attaining and disadvantaged pupils. These are disproportionately represented in my local cohort. The alignment of the PCC’s crime prevention agenda (reducing cyberbullying, online harm, anti-social behaviour facilitated by in-school phone use) with the local authority’s educational improvement agenda is a strong basis for partnership.

Exceptions to the policy: where leadership judgement matters most

Finally, it’d be remiss of me not to address exceptions to the rule. The guidance is clear that a school-led approach allows for them, and this is an area that deserves careful attention from senior leaders. Schools were asked whether they made exceptions for children who are young carers, children who speak English as an additional language, children with medical needs such as diabetes, children with mental health difficulties, and children with special educational needs.

For instance, a child with Type 1 diabetes managing an insulin pump via a connected smartphone app should not be expected to surrender their device at the school gate. A young carer who needs to be reachable in a family emergency sits in a different position from a teenager scrolling social media at break time. Senior leaders, governing bodies and local authority officers must ensure that the blanket framing of “phone-free by default” is accompanied by a considered individual risk assessment, communicated clearly to families and consistently applied.

Doing more with what crime leaves behind

The Thames Valley initiative is a small but meaningful example of what is possible when public institutions look beyond their own boundaries and ask: what would partnership make possible here? In a period of chronic underfunding, where school leaders are being asked to implement ambitious new policies without new resources, the creative redirection of assets such as the proceeds of crime is welcome, and unfortunately increasingly necessary.

The opportunity exists for PCCs across England to step forward as genuine partners in educational improvement. Dame Rachel de Souza’s framing of a “whole-society approach” to children’s online safety points in exactly the right direction. Schools cannot do this alone, and they should not have to.

Suggested further reading

Policy and evidence:

  • DfE, Mobile Phones in Schools guidance (updated January 2026) — gov.uk
  • House of Commons Education Committee, Screen Time: Impacts on Education and Wellbeing (May 2024)
  • Children’s Commissioner, School Phone Policies in England (April 2025) — childrenscommissioner.gov.uk
  • Beland & Murphy, Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction and Student Performance, LSE (2015)
  • Goodyear, James, Orben et al., ‘Approaches to children’s smartphone and social media use must go beyond bans’, BMJ (March 2025)
  • IFS, Annual Report on Education Spending in England 2025–26 — ifs.org.uk

Funding and finance:

  • School Cuts coalition — schoolcuts.org.uk
  • Education Policy Institute — epi.org.uk

Key thinkers to cite or engage with:

  • David H. Hargreaves — A Capital Theory of School Effectiveness and Improvement, BERJ (2001); Creating a Self-Improving School System (2010)
  • Andy Hargreaves & Michael Fullan — Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School (2012)
  • Dame Rachel de Souza (Children’s Commissioner) — her April 2025 report and BBC interview on leaving phone policy to headteachers
  • Pepe Di’Iasio (ASCL General Secretary) — on school funding pressures
  • Marmot Review (Fair Society, Healthy Lives, 2010) — for the framing of educational attainment gaps as a public health and social equity issue, directly applicable to Central Bedfordshire’s context