From January 2026, smartphones and smartwatches are off limits for the whole school day, recess included, with devices in lockers or bags. What MOE actually says, and what it leaves to parents.
By Marcus Toh · 2026-01-22
The old arrangement banned devices during lessons but left recess and after class windows open. MOE's enhanced measures close that gap from January 2026: smartphone and smartwatch use is not allowed during school hours including recess, co curricular activities and supplementary, enrichment and remedial lessons, with devices kept in designated storage such as lockers or in school bags, and schools able to allow use by exception where necessary.
Parents who need to reach a child can still do so through the school office, and payment wearables like the POSB Smart Buddy watch remain permitted for their function.
MOE's stated reasoning is the sentence parents should keep: screen use has been shown to displace sleep, physical activity and social interactions and is linked to poorer holistic wellbeing, and the measures aim to reduce digital distraction and foster face to face interaction. The same package even moved school laptop curfews earlier, and the sleep half of the story gets its own post.
The school day is now handled; the other fourteen hours belong to families, and the national Grow Well SG guidance is unusually specific for those hours: no screens under 18 months, less than one hour a day outside school for ages three to six, less than two hours for ages seven to twelve unless schoolwork, and the line most parents have not heard read aloud: parents should not give children unrestricted access to mobile devices, or any access to social media services.
I tutor the generation this policy is aimed at, and I will tell you what I see at my table: the phone does not need to be in the hand to cost marks, it costs marks from the pocket, because a mind that knows notifications are accruing rehearses them instead of the maths. The students who improved fastest in my three years were, with boring consistency, the ones whose families kept phones out of the study hour entirely, and MOE has now run that exact experiment at national scale.
So my advice is to stop treating the ban as the school's rule and start treating it as cover: the argument about being the only strict parent just ended, because every secondary student in the country now spends the day phoneless and survives. Mirror it at home with one move, a charging spot outside the bedroom from dinner onwards, and hold the line through the two whiny weeks it takes to become normal. The school just proved it is possible. The home gets to prove it is livable.
Through the school's office channels, as before the smartphone era: MOE's implementation keeps exception use available where genuinely necessary, so medical needs and family circumstances are handled with the school rather than around the rule.
Primary schools have long run restrictive phone rules school by school, and the January 2026 enhanced measures target secondary schools' full day use, with the national screen guidance covering the primary ages at home.
No, the PDLP device remains the sanctioned learning tool, managed by the Device Management Application, and the same measures tightened its default sleep hours to 10.30pm, so the policy distinguishes learning screens from social ones deliberately.