I WAS shocked at Education Secretary Gillian Keegan’s announcement when she addressed the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, that she was proposing to bring in a blanket ban on mobile phones in school classrooms.

But it was not the fact that she intends to do so that astounded me, so much as the revelation that they are not already banned.

I had assumed in my octogenarian naïveté that head teachers worth their salt had forbidden mobile phones from their classrooms years ago.

Things have come to a pretty pass when it takes a diktat from the Education Secretary to force them to do so.

One does not need to have graduated from university as a Bachelor of Education to know that permitting students to have mobile phones while at school, is a distraction and not conducive to learning or discipline.

It’s just plain common sense - a quality that seems to be in increasingly short supply among government ministers and academics these days.

ROBERT READMAN

Norwich Avenue West, Bournemouth