Jenga, dodgeball and no phones: a London school’s radical 12-hour day

Two months ago a radical experiment in one London state school hit the headlines. All Saints Catholic College announced it was piloting a 12-hour school day in what was reported as a bold attempt to break students’ phone addictions.

From 7am to 7pm on Monday to Thursday the youngest pupils, in years 7 and 8, could stay in school. For £10 a week, they would be served a cooked breakfast and “family” dinner, and offered activities from drama to ceramics and sports. The only catch: their phones had to remain in their bags, switched off, for the entire 12 hours. No peeking.

When the Guardian arrives at the school at 7am one Tuesday morning, headteacher Andrew O’Neill has already arrived on his racing bike and changed into a smart blue suit. He’s keen to show us how the project works, and to emphasise that it is not just about cracking phone addiction, but “giving children their childhood back”.

Phones have been at the heart of so many recent problems in the 900-pupil school, he says, including sexting, bullying and online extortion.

We cross the playground to a dance studio which has been turned into a breakfast buffet for the “7-7” children, offering eggs and hash browns to hungry 11- to 13-year-olds, who can then play Jenga or Uno until the school day proper begins at 8.30am.

Serenity, 12, is one of 117 pupils signed up to the voluntary 12-hour school day – somewhat reluctantly, complaining to her mother that it would be “too long” and “like a job”. But being parted from her phone is actually OK, she insists. “Even though you’re not on your phone, you still get to do fun activities that you enjoy.”

She is well aware of the downsides of phones for children her age. “It’s bad for your mental health,” she says. “Depending on what you watch, some things aren’t safe for younger children … Or you’re comparing yourself with others, and it’s not really nice, because you don’t feel good about yourself.”

It was when All Saints reopened fully after Covid that O’Neill noticed children were avoiding eye contact and struggled with holding conversations: “We started to see some issues creeping in – children not really having quite the same sense of belonging or desire to be part of bigger groups, and a little bit more isolationism and apathy.”

The 12-hour day idea emerged as a remedy to “reconnect young people to school” and to reframe school as a place not just for learning but also fun. Concerned at how many pupils would leave school, turn on their phones and stare at the screen until bedtime (or beyond), O’Neill wanted to give them a chance to socialise and play together in person.

“With the way society is at the minute, and phones is just one part of this, there is a sort of media culture where we try to turn early teens, pre-teens, into adults, way before they’re ready. And they want to become adults way before they’re ready, unless you create an environment where you just allow them to remain being children,” he says.

Despite its location among the multimillion-pound white stucco mansions of Ladbroke Grove, All Saints serves a community of high deprivation. Grenfell Tower is visible from the top floor and 50% of pupils qualify for “pupil premium”. A quarter have some sort of special educational need, and 10% have an “education healthcare plan” (ECHP).

With this cohort comes extra money, £20,000 of which has been used to fund the 10-week pilot project, paying for the extra meals and staff overtime.

When the normal school day ends at 3.15pm, the extended provision begins again. First there is an hour of homework – something the children insist they appreciate the most, because it gets it out of the way. “Work hard, play hard,” deadpans Alex, 11, who got his first phone at the age of five.

Then comes the fun bit: sports or art. We join a pottery class, where children are painting clay pots. Zara, 11, insists the 12-hour day isn’t a drag: “It’s not like I’m doing more lessons for more hours. It’s like I’m doing more activities, getting dinner and I’m getting my homework done, for only £10 a week.”

Louisa Tice, a trainee teacher who is running rounders, dodgeball and football sessions, thinks the 7-7 programme is helping the pupils improve their social skills. “This generation have become very socially anxious,” she says. Children know phones are part of that, she thinks, and so aren’t actually annoyed at being parted from them for 12 hours. “We are giving them something better.”

Some of the older pupils wish they, too, could do 7-7, nostalgic for the after-school clubs they attended at primary school. “I used to love extracurriculum clubs. I was in football. I used to do dance,” says Kyra, 16. Now, when she gets home after school, “it’s just me, myself and my phone.”

Most teenagers know they spend too much time on their phones – but so, they point out, do adults. “There’s lots of adults who still don’t know what’s right and wrong when using a phone and don’t hold themselves accountable for their actions online,” says 15-year-old Bella.

An important aspect of 7-7 is the family dinner, which not only gives pupils a hot meal they might miss at home, but also gets them used to chatting over the dinner table instead of looking down at a phone. When the Guardian visits, there is cheesy bolognese or chickpea and kale biryani, with pupils serving each other glasses of squash as they talk excitedly about their day.

The pilot project finishes at the end of June. O’Neill hopes to reprise it again in the new school year, but probably not in winter, when it goes dark at 4pm and the weather is too poor for outdoor sports.

A full evaluation will follow but, in the first six weeks, there was a 16% rise in 7-7 children getting merit stars, as well as a 12% drop in detentions for not doing their homework. Among pupils who previously had the worst homework records, the drop was 60%.

It’s hard to track screen time, but students say they are spending less time glued to their phones. Before 7-7, phones filled the after-school “vacuum”, says O’Neill: “We’re building better habits for them: the habit of doing homework, the habit of actually playing with their friends … and then a habit of actually engaging with their friends in a conversation over a meal.”

He believes the experiment is fundamentally changing the experience of school: “It’s about creating that sense of belonging and a reconnection back into the common good.”