I was standing at the school gate on Thursday, doing what I’ve done for fifty years and counting — watching children arrive — when I noticed something that stopped me mid-thought. A line of Year 8s, games bags on backs, walking in a tight little knot, and not one of them talking to another. Six thumbs, six screens, six separate worlds, all occupying the same six feet of pavement. Nobody bumped into anybody. Nobody laughed at anything that had actually happened in the previous ten seconds. It was oddly, perfectly synchronised, like a flock of starlings that had all individually decided to stop being a flock.

Two men enter, one man leaves — that was the line I couldn’t shake off the rest of the day. Bartertown*’s rule, not mine, but it kept surfacing because it’s not a bad description of what a smartphone does to a child’s attention. Something goes in — an hour, an afternoon, a Saturday — and something rather less than what went in comes out the other side. Not violence. Nothing so dramatic. Just erosion, quiet and continuous, of the ordinary boring magic of being bored, which is where half of childhood’s best ideas have always come from.

I don’t say this as a man who thinks the old days were better simply because they were his days. I’m wary of that particular vanity in myself, having watched enough colleagues fall into it over the decades to recognise the shape of it coming. Children have always needed adults to be a bit anxious on their behalf; that’s more or less the job. But there is something different about handing a twelve-year-old a device engineered by some of the best-resourced psychologists and designers on the planet to be as close to unputdownable as humanly possible, and then being surprised when they can’t put it down. We didn’t do that to any previous generation. We’ve done it to this one, largely by accident, and mostly because it was easier than the alternative.

The alternative, of course, is harder. It always is. It means a school being willing to say no to phones in a way that will annoy some parents who quite reasonably want to reach their child at pickup time. It means a parent being willing to be the one house on the street where the eleven-year-old doesn’t have Instagram yet, and living with the eye-rolling that follows. It means all of us admitting that “everyone else has one” was never actually a good argument, even when we were the ones using it about our own bicycles fifty+ years ago.

I was listening to Radio 4’s You and Yours this morning on the way in, and there was a segment on precisely this — except for once it wasn’t dressed up as another dopamine-addiction scare story, the sort nobody much acted on when the same warnings were doing the rounds about mobile phones the way they’d once done the rounds about cigarettes. Nobody gave up smoking, in my experience, because a doctor explained the biology of it to them. They gave it up when it stopped being what a certain kind of person did. What was interesting this morning was the suggestion that something similar might finally be happening with the always-on life — not children being told to comply, but grown adults, Gen X downwards, quite deliberately choosing friction back into their own days. Vinyl instead of a playlist that never ends. A flip-phone instead of the one with everything on it. Alcohol-free beer that exists, as far as I can tell, purely so the pub can go on being a pub rather than a place people leave early to get back to their screens. And half the country, by the sound of it, found itself in exactly that kind of room early this morning (6 July 2026), roaring at a football match in Mexico City that had no business being as dramatic as it turned out to be — ten men holding out at the Azteca, a stadium eight time zones away, and pubs the length and breadth of the country doing something no feed can replicate, which is a room full of strangers feeling the same thing at the same second.

What I keep coming back to is that none of this is really about technology at all. It’s about what childhood is for. It’s for scraped knees and arguments about whose turn it is and the particular tedium of a wet Wednesday in August with nothing to do, out of which children have always had to invent something — a game, a grievance, a joke that only makes sense to the two of them. The algorithm doesn’t want that kind of boredom to exist, because boredom is the one state a feed cannot monetise. So it fills every gap before the child even notices the gap was there. And the child who never experiences the gap never quite develops whatever it is that used to grow in it.

I don’t have a tidy policy announcement to make here, and I’m suspicious of anyone who does. But I do think schools like ours have a part to play that goes beyond banning phones in corridors, useful as that is and a practice over a decade old. It’s about deliberately, stubbornly protecting the parts of the day where nothing is optimised for anyone — a games afternoon with mud on it, a form period where the conversation is allowed to wander, a Founder’s Day where the whole point is standing about in a marquee talking to people you didn’t choose.

It’s not a new idea for us, particularly. We were putting sailing and outward-bound trips and the sort of debating that makes a child look a stranger in the eye at the centre of the timetable long before anyone thought there was anything to protect children against. We didn’t do it because we saw any of this coming. We did it because it seemed like more fun, frankly, and more useful, than another hour at a desk. It just happens to look, in hindsight, rather like exactly what a childhood needs when the alternative on offer is a feed.

Beyond the Thunderdome, there was still a world. Someone had to decide to walk out into it. I’ve always wanted Claires Court to be the sort of place that helps our children make that walk a little sooner, and a little more often, than the rest of the world currently seems to want to let them. That’s why my children followed my childhood into the school, and why the grandchildren will both be at Ridgeway in September. But for now, it’s time for the final school bell to ring this term, and for all of us to enjoy what looks like a lovely Summer ahead. People who know me well, know I have a set of clubs in one hand, and a trowel and secateurs in the other.  If Mad Max had to pick between a manicured golf course and a gritty allotment this Summer, he would choose survival. He might say: “You can either walk the wasteland in polyester, or you can grow potatoes and rule the dirt. I know which one keeps the apocalypse away – it’s time for the new potatoes to be dug up!

*Bartertown is a remote market-town outpost situated in the midst of the Wasteland. It was likely created during the two decades that saw Max Rockatansky wandering said region. Its primary focus and income is the trade and bartering with scavengers in the area, and travellers passing through.