To Dr. Alex Peterken and the Governing Board,

This is an open letter, signed and passionately supported by the Charterhouse community, objecting to the implementation of your upcoming phone policy.

We acknowledge that phone use in school is a contentious topic. There are both merits and serious drawbacks to having ease of access to phones during their school years. We also acknowledge that your policy has been created with good intentions and aims to have students develop a stronger bond amongst themselves, make most of their time at the School rather than staring at screens, and to build good phone hygiene in preparation for their university years. However, a blanket ban on phone usage is not an appropriate solution to a complicated subject. Instead, what we propose is creating a holistic approach that actually engages with the students to teach them about proper phone usage and that scales privileges according to age and development.

Your current plan contradicts any serious attempt to engage with the problems that arise from phone usage. The first pages of any developmental psychology textbook will show that weaning off bad habits, or developing good ones, is an iterative process founded on small achievements. Nearly every single student at Charterhouse owns a smartphone. Quitting ‘cold turkey’ only offsets the problem to their university years. Smartphones are an inevitable fact of life - your students will use them as soon as they graduate. How do you expect them to be able to have healthy phone hygiene in university and in professional life when they haven’t developed this habit over the course of their years at Charterhouse? Furthermore, being able to communicate with friends and family is an important outlet for stress and anxiety - cutting off this outlet will only amplify those negative feelings. This is especially detrimental to your international students, many of whom can only contact their friends through social media. Your approach will inevitably lead to an unnecessary bottling of negative emotions for your students. It will also lead to unnecessary animosity towards senior management, which will impact alumni engagement and donations down the line.

Instead of having your graduates entering into university with phone hygiene that was left undeveloped from age 13, we propose an alternative. Going behind the backs of the community that supports you is simply unacceptable. Rather than your current clandestine approach, you must open this significant decision to the wider school community. You must also leverage our network to bring valuable internal and external counsel as to how to create a gradual and holistic solution that captures the full nuances of this problem. What we need is procedural acclimatisation and comprehensive educational resources and not blanket bans that run away from the problem by choosing a one-size-fits-all solution.

Charterhouse is a leading school in the UK and in the world. To live up to this reputation, we need to embody the values we preach. Let’s build a solution that makes waves around the world, together.

Deo Dante Dedi