UPPSALA, Sweden — Two years after Sweden required every primary and lower-secondary school to keep students’ mobile phones out of the classroom, a government evaluation released Friday found that reading comprehension scores among 15-year-olds rose by the equivalent of about four months of learning, and that reported incidents of bullying fell by 18 percent.
The report, from the Swedish National Agency for Education, compared national test results and school incident records from 2023 with those from the 2025-26 school year, the first full year in which the ban applied to all 4,800 schools serving students through age 16. The agency said the strongest gains were among students in the lowest-performing third, whose reading scores improved by about 11 points on a 500-point scale.
“The children who were most distracted had the most to gain,” said Anders Holmgren, the agency’s director of evaluation. “That is exactly what the teachers told us would happen, and the data now say the same.”
Sweden was once a pioneer of digital classrooms, handing out tablets to first graders and digitizing textbooks. The reversal began in 2023, when the government paused its digital strategy and the education minister declared that screens had gone too far. The phone ban, which took effect in August 2024, requires schools to collect devices at the start of the day or require that they stay in lockers, with exceptions for medical needs.
Researchers urged caution in interpreting the results. The ban coincided with a return to printed textbooks, an expansion of reading hours and a reduction in class sizes in several large municipalities. “We can say with confidence that schools without phones are calmer and that scores went up,” said Prof. Lena Sjöberg of Uppsala University, who studies adolescent learning and was not involved in the evaluation. “We cannot fully separate the phone from everything else that changed. But I would not give the phones back to find out.”
At Tiundaskolan in Uppsala on Friday, students handed their phones into gray pouches at the door with the resignation of a long-settled routine. “The first month I thought I would die,” said Elsa Nyström, 14. “Now lunch is actually loud, because people talk.” Her classmate Omar Haddad, 15, was less enthusiastic. “It is fine,” he said. “I just think they should trust us more.”
The findings arrive as several European countries weigh similar measures. Denmark and the Netherlands have adopted national bans, and the European Commission has said it will issue recommendations on phones in schools before the end of the year. Mr. Holmgren said the agency would repeat the evaluation in 2028.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 15 of the European edition with the headline: Two Years Into a National School Phone Ban, Sweden Reports Better Grades and Fewer Fights.
