Mr. John Curtis:

The issue of phones is interesting. In our schools we deal with teenagers. Prohibition in that space can be very difficult. Part and parcel of being a teenager is to rebel and to not want to have rules foisted on one. It is more important that we try to engage parents on issues relating to digital bullying and how to manage things digitally. On one level, much work is being done on this but perhaps more needs to be done to make parents aware of the difficulties and the problems around online engagement.

Prohibition, certainly with regard to the pupils we have in our schools, would be difficult. We have to educate them on how to use it and to help them along the way. As I said, we are only finding out the proper ways ourselves. We have work to do in this regard and it is a very interesting question.

As for gender issues in schools, our schools are either mixed or single-gender schools. I imagine the problems in the single-gender schools might be different. I do not have any information to suggest there are more issues because people are in single-gender schools. I imagine the type of issues we deal with are perhaps slightly different but that is something on which I would need to reflect. I would be curious as to whether there is any extant literature on that. Again, as I said, we are all learning as we move through this process.