Phones in school: writing the device policy the law is about to require

Phones in school: writing the device policy the law is about to require

Spain's Organic Act on the Protection of Minors in Digital Environments has been going through parliament since September 2025 and contains an obligation many schools have not yet registered: every school will have to expressly regulate the use of phones, computers, tablets and any digital device, both in the classroom and across all other activities, in line with existing or forthcoming regional rules.

What the law brings beyond the ban

The context behind it is well known: the average age at which a child in Spain gets a phone is eleven, and 99% of them are on social networks. But the legislation goes further than classroom use:

• Express regulation of device use, in class and across all other school activities.
• Training plans in digital citizenship, privacy, intellectual property and media literacy.
• A rise from 14 to 16 in the minimum age for consenting to personal data processing on social networks.
• Factory parental controls enabled by default on phones, tablets, computers and televisions.

For a leadership team, what matters is not the public debate about whether to ban phones. It is that there will have to be a written, approved and communicated document, and that many schools today run on an unwritten custom that would not survive a complaint.

The seven sections the document needs

A useful device policy fits in three or four pages and answers seven things:

• Scope: who it applies to — students, teachers, administrative staff, visiting families — and where, expressly including extracurriculars, the canteen, transport and trips.
• What is allowed and when: with different criteria by stage, not a single rule for the whole school.
• School-owned devices: terms of use, liability for damage or loss, what is monitored and what is not.
• Educational use: how an exception is authorised, who authorises it and how it is communicated.
• Images and recordings: what can be recorded, who can record and what must not be shared.
• Consequences of breach: linked to the school's code of conduct and graded by severity.
• Review procedure: who reviews it, how often and how changes are communicated.

The section everybody forgets

Of the seven, the one that generates most conflict and gets written least is scope. Policies tend to be drafted with the classroom in mind, and then the problem appears on a trip, on the bus or during an extracurricular activity, where it is also harder to apply and fewer staff are supervising. The legislation expressly mentions activities beyond the classroom: cover them from the start.

Why differentiating by stage is not weakness

What makes sense in early years does not make sense in the final years of secondary, and a policy that treats the whole school identically breaches itself. A reasonable regime in the upper stages, with clear rules about when and what for, reduces systematic non-compliance far more than a total ban everyone knows is not enforced.

What changes in your consent records

The rise from fourteen to sixteen in the consent age is the point that most affects administration and the one least discussed.

In practice it requires reviewing your authorisation records. If the school holds consents signed by fourteen and fifteen-year-olds for processing that now requires sixteen, those consents may have lost their valid basis and need a legal guardian's signature.

Why this does not fit in a filing cabinet

And since this is not a one-off change but a threshold crossed every year, it helps if the system knows each student's age and flags when a consent needs a guardian's signature. Doing it by hand works while the school is small. At two hundred families it starts becoming a source of errors, and errors involving minors' consent are the hardest kind to put right.

How to communicate it so it is actually followed

A policy approved in June and posted on the website in September is not followed, because nobody has read it. Three things separate a living document from a filed one:

• Get it signed, not merely published: a communication with read receipt and digital signature by legal guardians turns the policy into a commitment and leaves evidence that it was communicated.
• Explain the why: policies that only list prohibitions generate resistance; those that explain the educational and wellbeing reasoning behind each rule generate considerably less.
• Teachers should know it before families do: nothing erodes a rule faster than two teachers applying it differently in the same corridor.

The digital citizenship plan

The law does not stop at restriction: it requires incorporating training in digital citizenship, privacy, intellectual property and media literacy. It is the constructive part and, frankly, the part that makes everything else defensible. A policy that only prohibits is hard to sustain in front of families; one that prohibits and teaches is not.

How to fit it in without inventing a subject

There is no need to create anything new. The sensible approach is to identify where this content fits into what is already taught — tutorial time, related subjects, the wellbeing plan — set minimums by stage and keep a record of what was delivered. That record is also what lets you demonstrate compliance without reconstructing it after the fact.

Case study (Spain)

A state-funded school covering early years through to the final year of secondary had an unwritten rule: phones off and put away all day. It worked reasonably well until a family complained about a device being confiscated during a trip, and the school discovered it had nothing written to back the action up.

The policy it then drafted ran to four pages and made three decisions that proved decisive. It differentiated by stage, with a more flexible regime in the final years that reduced systematic non-compliance. It included a specific section for trips and extracurriculars, which was exactly the gap that had produced the complaint. And it set out a two-line educational authorisation procedure, so that justified classroom use stopped being a tolerated infraction.

It was communicated with digital signature by legal guardians before the school year began. The following year, device-related incidents fell, but the most useful effect was different: when a conflict arose, there was a signed document to refer to.

Conclusion

Writing the device policy is not premature paperwork: it is the difference between handling a conflict with criteria everyone knows and improvising case by case. And since the law adds the duty to teach digital citizenship and raises the consent threshold to sixteen, the associated administrative work — authorisations, signatures, records — grows enough that it belongs in a system rather than a folder.

Edena handles authorisations and communications with digital signature, read receipts and age-aware controls, so there is evidence of what was communicated, to whom and when. Book a demo and we will show you how a school policy is distributed and signed across a full year.