The question here is the severity of the status. At first there was an attempt to ban phones all together. being a rural area, where kids attending post school activities etc need to be able to contact their parents, phones were allowed to be carried, but not to be used in school time.
    Part of the reason for this was not the bullying issue. bad as this was, it can be done at any time. More it was an attempt to stop the kids communicating en masse. The school walkout which marked the invasion of Iraq, for instance, was organised spontaneously with the aid of texting.
   I fully agree with not using phones in lessons, perhaps even in the playground if the reasons are sound. Should a child's education be put at risk if they use one, however. Surely its a matter of scale, and how easily unthinking authoritarianism topples into bizarre and ludicrous situations.Compliance to rules should not be about blind obedience ( are you aware of thhe Milgram experiments on obedience?) but coming to accept the validity of just rules, that the young person should gradually become more involved in framing. Top down blind obedience is simply uneducational as it prevents the growth of responsibility.