SANTIAGO, Chile — Chile’s Congress has approved a sweeping Chile smartphone ban in schools, passing a law that will prohibit students and staff from using personal electronic communication devices during class from preschool through high school, starting with the 2026 school year. Lawmakers say the measure is meant to curb distractions, protect mental health, and push students to re-engage with face-to-face learning after a decisive lower-house vote in Valparaíso on Dec. 2, 2025.
Why the Chile smartphone ban passed now
Parents’ groups and teachers had been urging tighter limits for years, arguing that constant phone use was eroding attention spans and fueling anxiety among teenagers. More than half of Chilean students told the OECD’s latest international assessment that digital devices disrupted their learning, a higher share than the global average.
Education Minister Nicolás Cataldo welcomed the vote as the start of a broader “cultural change” that reduces screen time and gets children “seeing each other’s faces again” during recess and group work, while still allowing technology when it clearly supports learning. A detailed statement from the Education Ministry describes the reform as part of a wider push to tackle online gambling, cyberbullying and addiction-like patterns of use among young people.
Chile smartphone ban joins global wave of school restrictions.
Chile is joining a fast-growing club of education systems placing hard limits on phones in classrooms. A UNESCO monitoring project linked to the 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report found that by the end of 2024, 79 education systems worldwide — about 40 per cent — had some form of legal or policy ban on smartphones in schools, including France, the Netherlands, China and several U.S. states.
International coverage, including reporting by the Associated Press, has framed Chile as the latest example of governments responding to mounting evidence that phones can undermine learning when they are ever-present in class.
How the Chile smartphone ban will work in classrooms
The new law does not mention only “cellphones.” Instead, it regulates “personal communication electronic devices” — a broad category that covers smartphones and any gadget used for calls, messaging or internet access during the school day. A general ban will apply to curricular activities in classrooms from preschool through secondary school, and it will cover all members of the school community, including staff.
Use will still be allowed in tightly defined cases: when a student has certified special educational needs, in emergencies or disasters, for diagnosed health conditions requiring monitoring, or when a teacher deems a device genuinely useful for a specific lesson or extracurricular activity. Guardians may also request temporary permission for safety reasons, but those requests must be formally approved by the school principal.
For upper-secondary schools, the law leaves limited room for flexibility. Internal regulations may designate specific spaces, times or activities where devices can be used, reflecting the “progressive autonomy” of older students. Enforcement guidelines will be drawn up by the Education Superintendence, and schools have until June 30, 2026, to align their internal rules, with a national evaluation of the policy due in 2030. A previous step in the process came in October 2025, when the Senate’s education committee endorsed a version of the bill that strengthened the ban and sent it to the full chamber. Senate records show that earlier drafts dating back several years were merged into the final text.
Chile’s Education Ministry has laid out the core legal language and exceptions in an extensive explainer; its official summary of the law emphasises that devices may still be used for pedagogy when explicitly authorised, but not for casual messaging or social media during class time.
Pilot experiences hint at life after phones.
The national law follows local experiments that tried to show what a phone-free school day might look like. In Santiago’s Lo Barnechea district, a public secondary school drew international attention earlier this year by locking students’ phones in signal-blocking pouches during the day, a program described in an earlier AP feature on the pilot. Students told reporters they were spending more time on sports, music rehearsals and face-to-face conversations once scrolling was no longer an option.
Those local trials unfolded as UNESCO and other bodies warned that even the mere presence of a smartphone on a desk can drag down focus, and that bans tend to help lower-performing students the most. At the same time, some digital-learning advocates cautioned against overreach, arguing for strong regulation and digital-literacy education rather than blanket prohibitions — a debate Chilean officials say they will revisit when they assess the law’s impact later in the decade.
Whether the Chile smartphone ban ultimately boosts test scores or simply reshapes school culture, it will force millions of families, teachers and students to renegotiate how and when young people stay connected — and what being present in class really means — once the new rules kick in with the 2026 school year.
