France Is Banning Phones in All High Schools — Here's What's Happening

French high schools are scrambling to ban mobile phones starting the week of August 31, 2026. President Emmanuel Macron signed the law on August 24 and said it must take effect from the first day of the school year. Government spokesperson Maud Brégeon confirmed the ban will cover all high schools across France.

France already bans phones in primary schools and middle schools (for children aged 11 to 15). With this new law, French students will not be allowed to use phones at school from their earliest years all the way through high school graduation.

Under the new rules, each high school must update its internal rulebook to ban mobile phones and other connected devices on school grounds. A student who brings a phone must put it in a locker when they arrive. The Ministry of Education published guidance for schools on July 2, 2026, and later released a step-by-step guide for administrators on its website.

The phone ban is actually one part of a bigger plan. Macron had also wanted to ban social media for children under 15, but France's Constitutional Council — a body that checks whether laws respect the constitution — struck that down. The council said the definition of "social media" was too vague and the ban would unfairly limit freedom of expression. It also worried that checking everyone's age online would raise privacy problems. The phone-ban part of the same law passed the council's review and survived.

Macron's office says he has not given up on the social media ban. The government is rewriting the law and hopes to pass it before Macron leaves office in May. Valère Ndior, a law professor at the University of Western Brittany, said legal experts were not surprised the original social media ban was rejected, and that fixing it will be very difficult.

Teachers' unions say the phone ban will be hard to put into practice. Jérôme Fournier, a leader of the SE-Unsa trade union, said it is "impossible to put the phone ban in place from scratch from 1 September." Schools need a consultation process and a vote, and students themselves must be consulted. Changing a school's rules takes time, and many schools say they will struggle to do it quickly.

Fournier pointed out several real problems. Many students use phone apps for everyday school tasks like checking their schedule, seeing room changes, and tracking homework. Some use their phones as digital badges to get into the cafeteria or borrow library books. High schools also serve older students, some aged 20, who need phones for work. Another big question is where the ban applies: everywhere in the building, or with exceptions like the playground? Fournier warned that students might leave school to use their phones on the street, which could create safety risks.

Fournier also made a political point: students should be consulted on how the ban works, rather than "treated as children." Some older students are nearly adults, and some in their final year will vote in the next presidential election.

The broader context here is that Macron is working against two deadlines at once: the start of the school year and the end of his time in office. The phone ban is now law, but schools have only weeks to hold consultations, buy lockers, and figure out how to handle students of very different ages. The social media ban is even harder to pass, because it must meet the Constitutional Council's demands for clear definitions and privacy protections. Whether the rewritten version can succeed before May is a question that legal experts like Ndior call genuinely difficult.

For school leaders, the problem is simple but frustrating: the law says students must hand over their phones at the door, but many schools now run on phone-based apps, badges, and communication tools. Each school has to find its own way through that gap, on its own timeline.