From October, something fairly unusual will happen at North Berwick High. Pupils will still bring their phones in, but during lessons they'll go into secure storage. Younger pupils across East Lothian will use lockable boxes, while P1 to P3 pupils won't bring phones to school at all. Councillors approved the new "mobile free learning" policy unanimously on 25 August.
You could call that a ban. The council prefers not to, and for once the distinction is more interesting than the terminology.
A ban by any other name
The policy grew out of a much harder proposal last October: a full "bell-to-bell" ban, put forward by backbench councillors who cited a Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association survey in which 71% of members said phones were harming behaviour and learning, and 92% reported lessons being interrupted by them.
Councillors backed a consultation-led amendment instead, renaming the policy around supporting head teachers rather than banning devices, and building in pupil voice and exemptions for medical and additional-support needs. It draws the boundary around learning, not around banning the phone from a teenager's day entirely.
And this isn't really a retreat from technology. East Lothian has also rolled out individual Chromebooks to secondary pupils and increased shared-device stock in primaries, building on a 1:1 pilot that began at Dunbar Grammar in August 2025. It's drawing a line between the screen picked for a lesson and the one carrying everything else competing with it.
Nor is East Lothian acting alone. In June, the Scottish Government said it intends to legislate for phone-free learning environments across Scotland.
Will any of this work?
Will any of this make teenagers happier, or better students? That's where I'd be wary.
A large English study published last year compared 1,227 pupils in schools with restrictive and permissive phone policies. Pupils at restrictive schools spent about 40 minutes less on their phones during the school day, but researchers found no evidence they used their phones less overall during the week, or had better mental wellbeing. An older English study did find a modest improvement in exam results after schools introduced bans, concentrated among lower-achieving pupils.
So secure storage may be useful classroom management. It is probably not a cure for being 14 with a smartphone.
The classroom was never a third place
Here's a theory for why that evidence stays so mixed: a classroom was never what sociologists call a "third place." Ray Oldenburg coined the term in 1989, for somewhere that's neither home (your "first place") nor work (your "second place"): a café, a pub, a barbershop, a church hall. Somewhere you don't have to be, where conversation is the whole point and nobody's in charge of you.
A school fails that test before you've even got to the phones: attendance is compulsory, there's a teacher, nobody's there for the chat. So "phone-free learning" was never really about protecting a third place. It has to be justified on narrower ground — attention, behaviour, exam results — which is probably why the evidence keeps landing narrower too.
The café's second-place problem
North Berwick's actual third places, the café and the pub, are where this gets interesting, and they're not fighting off the same thing.
Back in 2022, Steampunk owner Catherine Franks wrote about the change she was seeing after working from home took off: more people arriving alone with laptops, sometimes staying for hours. Her concern wasn't really the laptop itself. She'd previously offered WiFi, plug points, even work pods, recognising what a café means to somebody tired of working alone at home. What worried her was what happened when too many people wanted to use the same café as an office at the same time.
She called an outright laptop ban "clumsy." Tellingly, the phrase she reached for in her post's title was "third space." What she was really describing was her second place colonising her third one.
Researchers studying venues in London found that the rise of remote and flexible work has pushed cafés and similar spaces in different directions. Some actively welcome laptop workers. Some protect their older role as places for conversation. Others try to do both, separating tables or times of day. It's the undecided middle where conflicts over noise, tables and how long somebody can reasonably stay tend to show up.
That feels like a more useful way to think about it than deciding laptop users are either freeloaders or the future of the High Street.
For the person at the screen, a café may be the thing that gets them out of the spare bedroom and around other human beings for an hour. For the café, the same person can occupy a table through a busy lunch while buying very little. Neither side has to be unreasonable for the arrangement to stop working.
It's just a second place and a third place trying to occupy the same four tables.
The pub's first-place problem
The pub's version runs the other way: if a café's third place is being colonised by the second, a pub's is being colonised by the first.
On 17 August, Wetherspoon told customers across its 792 pubs not to play videos or music aloud, or take calls on speakerphone. It didn't ban smartphones. It still encourages customers to order through its own app.
This isn't work elbowing its way in. It's home. A speakerphone call or a loud video is somebody's private, first-place life spilling into a room that's supposed to belong to everyone in it at once, which is exactly where your phone stops being your business and starts being everybody else's afternoon.
There's some evidence behind that instinct. In a 2018 study, 304 people eating with friends and family were randomly assigned to keep their phones on the table or put them away. Those with phones out felt more distracted and enjoyed the meal less. Nobody in that study was on a work call. The phone alone, just sitting there, was enough to change the room.
What North Berwick is actually defending
Put the three examples together and I don't think we're watching a backlash against technology. I think we're watching North Berwick's third places try to stay third places.
A café's fighting off the second place. A pub's fighting off the first. A classroom never had a third place to defend, which is why its fight looks different, and why the evidence never resolves as neatly.
That may be the more interesting argument happening around North Berwick right now: how easily we let one part of life leak into another.
The technology's very good at erasing boundaries.
North Berwick, it turns out, is quite interested in putting a few back.