Message from the Executive Principal 

School Council 2024

I am pleased to announce the our School Council recently held their AGM and finalised its composition for 2024, appointing Helen Collins as the new Council President. Helen has had a long association with school in a variety of contexts, and her two daughters are at the school. Our long serving outgoing President Deb Fisher finished on Council at the AGM, where she was thanked for her very significant length of service, contribution and leadership on Council. I would like to thank Deb personally for her immense support, particularly at my commencement. The school is fortunate to have an experienced, stable and hard working School Council. The full listing of Council members is here https://www.whs.vic.edu.au/about/council/

Talent Quest photos and videos

We held our annual Talent Quest in the last week of Term 1. It was a full house, and there was great energy to support our talented students and staff perform. There are some great photos and the full professional video of the whole night available on our website https://www.whs.vic.edu.au/talentquest/. The video is filmed and produced by past student and professional videographer Ben Christie - you will be impressed by the talent as well as the high standard of videography.

Mobile phones - drawing attention to the significant impacts of mobile phones on adolescents

I have written and spoken a lot about the schools position on mobile phones and I thank parents for their support and cooperation with our efforts to ensure the most productive learning climate during the day, unimpacted by student mobile phone use. We are very pleased with the student response to our efforts.

Please continue to assist by:

• not contacting your child during the school day via their mobile phones. This contact often leads to students using their phones in breach of our policy (and that of the Department) and, at times, unnecessary conflict. You can instead contact Reception at any time on 57230500 for urgent and non-urgent messages, which will be passed on to your child. The school can also support students to contact parents/carers as needed during the day - students should never be directly contacting you on their phones.
• to support an appropriate 'cost' for phone misuse our practice is to confiscate phones when they are used at all during the school day. We only return confiscated phones to parents/carers, not to the student directly. The phones are kept in secure private storage until parents collect them. Our policy encourages parents to consider leaving the phone in secure storage for at least one night as an appropriate 'cost' for the wilful breach of stated expectations. 

I was interviewed by the Wangaratta Chronicle last week about the impacts of mobile phones on adolescent learning and wellbeing, and they chose to feature the article on their front page as the lead article. The full text is below (or accessible on our website https://www.whs.vic.edu.au/mobile_phones/)

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Dial in to phone issue  - Community needed to support school efforts to curb smartphone use

By SIMONE KERWIN (Wangaratta Chronicle, Wednesday 24th April 2024)

WANGARATTA High School executive principal Dave Armstrong believes the wider community is the "missing link" in safeguarding young people from excessive use of devices and social media apps.

Admitting to grappling with the issue both as an educator and a parent, Mr Armstrong said while there were definite benefits to emerge from the technology, smartphones posed a significant distraction for teenagers, and this was being regularly noticed at school.

"I think this whole issue needs a lot more attention," Mr Armstrong said.

"While our generation had a play-based adolescence, our children are having a phone-based adolescence.

"(Excessive use of mobile phones) is linked to depression and anxiety; we are creating an anxious generation.

"Never has youth mental health been so bad; other things have happened too, of course, like COVID, but there is a direct link between (excessive) use of smartphones and poor mental health.

"As parents, we've put more controls in place and stopped young people doing things we used to do, like playing outside and going out all day, but have allowed - through smartphones - unchecked, uncontrolled access to the internet 24/7; we didn't see the danger right in front of us.

"I think we often don't realise this is happening around us.

"We have unwittingly allowed tech companies access to our children and allowed them to 'engage' with our children in ways that are nothing like the real-world experience with others that they need to learn about socialisation, communication and real engagement.

"This virtual 'engagement' is engineered for addiction and is sedentary, isolated, artificial and incompatible with childhood and adolescent development.

"Smartphones are, in hindsight, one of the biggest uncontrolled experiments on humans in history, with every one of the tools they feature designed with addiction in mind.

"I think we've lost perspective."

The high school follows the State Government's policy on mobile phones in schools, introduced at the start of 2020, which requires all phones to be switched off and stored securely during the school day.

"Phones can have educational benefits, but they've got to be really, really tightly controlled," Mr Armstrong said.

"During a school day, they are a distraction, and are taking away from learning.

"They’re so pervasive, and it's the times they're used in such a bad way, such as in cyberbullying, that are really concerning.

"We want to have this time at school as a sacred time for learning, socialising and play."

The high school's mobile phone policy was updated in 2022 with a change to consequences for breaching the rules; confiscated phones are now returned not to students, but to parents or guardians, who are asked to collect them no earlier than the next day.

"The ban had already been implemented, but in 2024 we have really been consistent, persistent and relentless in the application of the policy, because it was becoming a real point of conflict," Mr Armstrong said.

"The consequences are an important part of the ban."

He said he was hopeful that more parents would hold off as long as possible on putting a smartphone into their children's hands.

"I'd encourage parents to talk among their peer groups, and band together to say, 'We're going to wait to provide a phone', particularly in primary school, and as long as possible after that," he said.

"If it's seen as critical (for them to have one), a non-smartphone which only allows phone calls and text messages is better for primary-aged students.

"The same applies for early adolesence, when I advise parents to hold off as long as possible from providing smartphones, to allow life experience and maturity to develop; I recommend that social media should not be accessible before 16 years of age."

Mr Armstrong said young people were not effectively learning the nuances of direct personal contact, and in many cases were addressing large numbers of people at once in social media chats, which required skills they had not yet developed.

"In the real world, people usually talk directly to one person or sometimes a few people at once," he said.

"However, in the virtual world, messages can reach a very large audience.  Online, a young person is likely to be having multiple conversations at the same time, but this can make each interaction less meaningful.

"When sending messages to a large group, young people will of course worry about their reputation; making a mistake or not doing well can affect how many people see them.

"Because of this, online communication is often more about showing off, can cause more stress than simple face-to-face talks, and is a significant driver of anxiety.

"Kids experiencing puberty online often face more issues - like constantly comparing themselves to others, feeling self-conscious, dealing with public embarrassment, and ongoing anxiety - than teenagers in past generations.  This can make their developing brains constantly defensive."

"If you go to any school, you will see this issue is a big challenge, but we aim to have our students turn off their phones at 9am for the entire school day.

"We also encourage parents not to ring or message during the day; if there are urgent messages, they can be relayed through the office.

"We have to consider that when our child is at school, they are uncontactable via mobile phone."

Mr Armstrong said the other key thing parents and the community could do was support more free play, independence and responsibility in the real world.

"Play sports; walk to the shop to buy milk for the family or do other errands; go on school camps; do community service; walk to meet friends and relatives: the same level of freedom that most adults experienced when they were young.

"Nurture a non-phone-based childhood or adolescence; smartphones are a barrier to experiencing all that is wonderful about life."

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