Greece announces new rules banning mobile phones in schools from September

Students at schools in Greece will be required to keep their mobile phones inside their bags at all times during lessons when the new academic year starts on 11 September.

The new regulations were announced after a meeting between Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Education Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis.

"Students can bring their mobile phones to school, but they must keep them inside their school bags during the entire school day," Mitsotakis said in Athens on Saturday as he announced the ‘Cellphone in the School Bag’ campaign.

"Scientific data on how the use of mobile phones during the school day affects the learning process itself are overwhelming. From distraction to other important issues, it is clear that mobile phones have no place in school during the school day."

Under the new rules, pupils who don't comply will be excluded from school for one day. In the case of a repeat offence, teachers have the power to remove pupils from lessons for several days. And anyone filming their classmates or their teachers without permission could face expulsion.

"We don't necessarily expect 100% compliance from day one, but we do want the children, their parents and educators to understand the importance of pupils being focused entirely on the educational process at school," Mitsotakis said.

Those regulations are an extension of new rules Pierrakakis announced in March which saw students face expulsion for filming classmates and ridiculing them online in a bid to clamp down on cyberbullying.

But this is the first time in Greece that a broad system of penalties has been established to tackle mobile phone use in school, which officials have called a "significant distraction".

Previously, a general ban on mobile phones in schools dating back to 2002 was in place but teachers said they found it difficult to enforce.

But a spokesperson for the high school teachers' union OLME said on Greek radio that it was important to work to convince pupils to switch off their phones and not just threaten them with punishment.

These regulations come a week after mobile phones were outlawed in 373 schools in the primarily French-speaking Belgian region of Wallonia.