The Pouch Shakedown

The cost of phone pouches to UK state secondary schools will be, approximately, an initial £63.53 million and an annual fee of at least £12.6 million.

I am finding it hard to believe that this could be happening and no-one be talking about it. Here are my workings:

The Irish government recently signed a €9 million pouch deal, including an estimated €1.7 million a year to replace pouches. This source contains the figure of €20 per pupil.

There were 456,625 secondary pupils in Ireland in 2022, according to the World Bank. €9 million divided by 456,625 = €19.7, so that tallies with the €20 per pupil figure.

There were 3,671,427 state funded secondary school pupils in the UK in 2024/25. €20 per pupil gives an initial cost of €73,428,540 and an annual fee of €14,685,708, which translates to £63.53 million and £12.6 million.

Wow!

I’m no fan of children having access to smartphones at school! But, when one considers that state schools can simply ban smartphones from premises and go brickphone only…..
and that increasing numbers, though sadly not quickly enough, are doing so (see ‘brickphone only’ secondaries such as The Fulham Boys, Archer Academy, London Oratory School)..…
and that going ‘brickphone only’ costs nothing ….
and it is far far more effective at safeguarding pupils……...
I have to ask…..

What is going on??!

I appreciate, in the grand scheme of an education budget of £122 billion, that £63.53 million may not seem a huge amount. But it could pay for a hell of a lot of sports equipment, musical instruments and computers! For example, the National Plan for Music announced in 2022 included “£25 million (to) allow schools to purchase around 200,000 musical instruments and equipment”.

The annual fee of £12.6 million dwarfs the recent announcement of £5m in “new funding to support state-funded secondary schools in England in 2026-27 to increase book supplies to support the National Year of Reading”. The money for pouches, despite what some will try to pretend, is not chicken feed.

Bizarrely, given their left leaning politics, Trade Unions such as The National Education Union and NASUWT have been silent on pouches, whilst an entire section of school behaviour policy is effectively privatised by the back door. In fact, it is now the case that both unions have given their support for companies to enter UK schools and be paid handsomely for thousands of floppy pouches and some magnets (as well as those companies being able to extract valuable data).

Have the Unions run the numbers past their membership?

The media, too, says next to nothing, as UK schools move fatally towards ineffective pouch storage systems. No reporting, no numbers that I can find. Even dedicated education publications such as The TES and Schools Week don’t seem interested.

When one considers that, once in place, pouches will be very difficult to remove, for how long is it planned that state schools will pay an annual fee for this service? 10 years? 20? More…?

For some peculiar reason, information and scrutiny seems to be absent, at a time of severe school budget constraints. Can someone make it make sense?