No more snapping up bargains on Vinted during Modern Studies

Portobello High School will be first in Scotland to introduce a zero-phone policy for pupils. Pupils will place their devices into magnet-locked Yondr pouches for the duration of the school day. Pictured are S3 pupils Julia and Carly (Picture: Lisa Ferguson)

The city’s education chief, Councillor Joan Griffiths, the teachers of Portobello and Queensferry High Schools and, of course, the students and their parents deserve a huge round of applause for having the courage to go phone-free. As a fellow smartphone addict, I know how difficult it is to contemplate even half-an-hour without my iPhone within easy reach. I can’t begin to contemplate how I would cope from 9am to 3.30pm.

The students won’t have to part with their precious phones. They have to store them in Yondr pouches which are locked and unlocked magnetically, but they will be able to carry them from class to class. I am sure there will be the odd student who works out a hack to access their precious phone when they are not supposed to, but the majority will comply with the new rules. And what a difference it will make.

There will be no more WhatsApp notifications pinging during French class. No sneaky Signal chats to distract from algebra. No surreptitious Instagram stories, no Snapchat, and definitely no snapping up a bargain on Vinted while the Modern Studies teacher has her back turned. It will be just like the old days. Or maybe not. I fervently hope that Edinburgh’s pilot proves to be a huge success and every school in the city locks up phones during the school day, but no-one can pretend that schools can ignore the digital revolution that has only started.

The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) revealed last week that there were 31 instances of pupils caught cheating using artificial intelligence (AI) last year, compared to none in 2023. That may seem far too few to get hot and bothered about, but AI is developing very quickly and many schoolkids are already well versed at using chatbots such as ChatGPT. My granddaughter uses it to create crochet patterns, and I am sure that many, many students now turn to the app on their phone for help with their homework.

But it is AI’s potential to change how and what our children learn that education chiefs need to be thinking about, rather than how many second-year pupils asked Grok to write an essay on human rights. Two years ago, I wrote here about Dr Geoffrey Hinton, the former Edinburgh University student known as the “Godfather" of AI. He had just stood down from his role at Google, warning that AI systems like ChatGPT were quite scary. “Right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be,” he said.

If that happens, then traditional education – even when done on an iPad – will be of little use in the future. As AI develops, so the world of work will change. Legal firms, for example, will not need a team of young lawyers to check contracts and other legal documents if a chatbot can do it in seconds. We need to teach our youngsters how to use AI, not so they can cheat, but so they can succeed.