Twelve to Fifteen Year Olds Lose Their Phones at School on 1 January, and About Half of Third-Cycle Schools Had Already Decided That Themselves

President António José Seguro signed the diploma on Friday that pushes Portugal's school smartphone ban up through the ninth year. The Presidency's own note describes it precisely: an amendment to Decreto-Lei n.º 95/2025, of 14 August 2025, "extending to pupils of the 3rd cycle of basic education the regime restricting the use of mobile phones and other electronic equipment or mobile communication devices with internet access in a school context".

The date attached to it is the part parents should write down. The rules do not start with the school year. They start on 1 January 2027, which hands schools the whole first term to work out lockers, pouches, collection routines and what happens when a pupil refuses.

Who this actually catches

Portugal's basic education runs in three cycles. The first covers years one to four, the second years five and six, and the third years seven, eight and nine. Until now the ban was compulsory only in the first and second cycles, which is roughly ages six to eleven. The third cycle brings in pupils of about twelve to fifteen, the exact age band where a phone stops being a parent's tracking device and becomes a social life.

What makes the measure less of a rupture than it sounds is that about half of Portugal's third-cycle schools had already banned phones on their own initiative during the last school year, without being told to. The government is not so much imposing a new norm as ratifying one that a large share of the network had already adopted and then measured.

That measurement is the stated basis for the decision. When the Education Minister announced the extension a month ago, he cited two things: the international drift towards phone-free classrooms, and a fresh survey of school directors. The directors who had gone phone-free reported more socialising and less indiscipline. It is self-reported evidence from people with an interest in the answer, and it should be read that way, but it is at least evidence gathered from inside the Portuguese system rather than borrowed from abroad.

Two other education diplomas went through the same day

The phone rule travelled in company. Seguro also promulgated the diploma approved in Council of Ministers on 30 July that reworks the exceptional and temporary measures for the teacher shortage, and the scientific requirements for hiring post-Bologna teaching staff.

Two changes inside it matter. The list of shortage regions shrinks from ten Quadros de Zona Pedagógica covering 258 school units to eight covering 235, all of them in Greater Lisbon, the Setúbal Peninsula and the Algarve; the €750 top-up for teachers who delay retirement is restricted to those schools. And the bar for teaching without a formal teaching qualification is now the subject area of your degree rather than a minimum credit count in it, so an economics graduate can teach economics and a psychology graduate can teach psychology. Both were cleared by the Cabinet at the start of August alongside the rolling teacher-hiring contest.

What this means for you

• If your child is in years seven to nine: nothing changes in September. The obligation lands on 1 January 2027, and your school should tell you its storage arrangements during the first term.
• If your school already banned phones: you are probably in the half that moved early, and the diploma simply makes the existing house rule national law.
• Contactability: the restriction applies in a school context, not on the journey. Agree with your child now how you reach each other during the day, because the school office becomes the channel again.
• Newly arrived families: read this next to the back-to-school cost picture and the September teacher placements, because the same three regions appear in all three files.

The honest test of this policy arrives a year from now, when someone asks the directors the same survey question again and the answers come from schools that were made to do it rather than schools that chose to.